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North Korea THE LEGACY OF JAPANESE COLONIALISM
Korea did not escape the Japanese grip until 1945, when Japan
lay prostrate under the Allied victory 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 deepened tenancy, industrialization and
extraordinary dislocation, and political mobilization and
deactivation. It also spawned 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.
Colonialism was often thought to have created new countries
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 colonialist
power decided to grant independence. But all this had existed in
Korea for centuries before 19l0. 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 19l0: 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 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 ancient regime, Korea's sovereignty and
independence, its indigenous if incipient modernization, and
above all its national dignity. 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 their
love/hate relationship.
Japan built bureaucracies in Korea, all of them centralized
and all of them big by colonial standards. Unlike the relatively
small British colonial cadre in India, there were 700,000
Japanese in Korea 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 Japanese 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
provisioned credit to firms and entrepreneurs, almost all of them
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 Seoul headquarters
of Japan's Government-General of Korea, turning it into the nerve
center of the country. Semiofficial companies and conglomerates,
including the big zaibatsu (commercial conglomerates) 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 were 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 occupied the 1930s. Growth rates in
the Korean economy often outstripped those in Japan itself; one
estimate suggested an annual growth rate for Korea of 3.57
percent in the 1911-38 period and a rate of 3.36 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. 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 provided a surreptitious model for both Koreas in the
postwar period. Japan showed them an early version of the
"bureaucratic-authoritarian" path to industrialization, and it
was a lesson that seemed well learned by the 1970s.
Data as of June 1993
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