South Korea KOREA UNDER JAPANESE RULE
Japan's Residency General
Courtesy Carpenter Collection, Library of Congress
Korea underwent drastic changes under Japanese rule. Even
before the country was formally annexed by Japan in 1910, the
Japanese caused the last ruling monarch, King Kojong, to abdicate
the throne in 1907 in favor of his feeble son, who was soon
married off to a Japanese woman and given a Japanese peerage.
Japan then governed Korea under a residency general and
subsequently under a governor general directly subordinate to
Japanese prime ministers. All of the governor generals were
high-ranking Japanese military officers.
In theory the Koreans, as subjects of the Japanese emperor,
enjoyed the same status as the Japanese; but in fact the Japanese
government treated the Koreans as a conquered people. Until 1921
they were not allowed to publish their own newspapers or to
organize political or intellectual groups.
Nationalist sentiments gave rise to a Korean student
demonstration in Japan, and on March 1, 1919, to a Proclamation
of Independence by a small group of leaders in Seoul. With the
consolidation of what became known as the March First Movement,
street demonstrations led by Christian and Ch'ondogyo (a movement
that evolved from Tonghak) groups erupted throughout the country
to protest Japanese rule.
In the wake of the protest, Japan granted considerable
latitude to Korea. As historians have noted, the ensuing
intellectual and social ferment of the 1920s marked a seminal
period in modern Korean history. Many developments of the period,
including the organization of labor unions and other social and
economic movements, had continuing influence into the
postliberation period. In the 1930s, however, the ascendancy of
the military in Japanese politics reversed the change.
Particularly after 1937, when Japan launched the Second SinoJapanese War (1937-45) against China, the colonial government
decided on a policy of mobilizing the entire country for the
cause of the war. Not only was the economy reorganized onto a war
footing, but the Koreans were to be totally assimilated as
Japanese. The government also began to enlist Korean youths in
the Japanese army as volunteers in 1938, and as conscripts in
1943. Worship at Shinto shrines became mandatory, and every
attempt at preserving Korean identity was discouraged.
The Korean economy also underwent significant change. Japan's
initial colonial policy was to increase agricultural production
in Korea to meet Japan's growing need for rice. Japan had also
begun to build large-scale industries in Korea in the 1930s as
part of the empire-wide program of economic self-sufficiency and
war preparation. Between 1939 and 1941, the manufacturing sector
represented 29 percent of Korea's total economic production. The
primary industries--agriculture, fishing, and forestry--occupied
only 49.6 percent of total economic production during that
period, in contrast to having provided 84.6 percent of total
production between 1910 and 1912.
The economic development taking place under Japanese rule,
however, brought little benefit to the Koreans. Virtually all
industries were owned either by Japan-based corporations or by
Japanese corporations in Korea
(see The Japanese Role in Korea's Economic Development
, ch. 3). As of 1942, Korean capital
constituted only 1.5 percent of the total capital invested in
Korean industries. Korean entrepreneurs were charged interest
rates 25 percent higher than their Japanese counterparts, so it
was difficult for Korean enterprises to emerge. More and more
farmland was taken over by the Japanese, and an increasing
proportion of Korean farmers either became sharecroppers or
migrated to Japan or Manchuria. As greater quantities of Korean
rice were exported to Japan, per capita consumption of rice among
the Koreans declined; between 1932 and 1936, per capita
consumption of rice declined to half the level consumed between
1912 and 1916. Although the government imported coarse grains
from Manchuria to augment the Korean food supply, per capita
consumption of food grains in 1944 was 35 percent below that of
1912 to 1916.
Under Japanese rule, intellectual influences different from
traditional Buddhist, Confucianist, and shamanistic beliefs
flooded the country. Western-style painting was introduced, and
literary trends, even among writers who emphasized themes of
social protest and national independence, tended to follow
Japanese and European models, particularly those developed during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The works of
Russian, German, French, British, American, and Japanese authors
were read by the more educated Koreans, and Korean writers
increasingly adopted Western ideas and literary forms. Social and
political themes were prominent. Tears of Blood, the first
of the "new novels," published by Yi In-jik in serial form in a
magazine in 1906, stressed the need for social reform and
cultural enlightenment, following Western and Japanese models. Yi
Kwang-su's The Heartless, published in 1917, stressed the
need for mass education, Western science, and the repudiation of
the old family and social system. Ch'ae Man-sik's Ready Made
Life, published in 1934, protested the injustices of colonial
society.
In the 1920s and 1930s, socialist ideas began to influence
the development of literature. In 1925 left-wing artists,
rejecting the romanticism of many contemporary writers,
established the Korean Proletarian Artists' Federation, which
continued until it was suppressed by Japanese authorities in
1935. One of the best representatives of this group was Yi
Ki-yong, whose 1936 novel Home tells of the misery of
villagers under Japanese rule and the efforts of the protagonist,
a student, to organize them. Poets during the colonial period
included Yi Sang-hwa, Kim So-wol, and Han Yong-un. But the
beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War marked a period of
unprecedented repression in the cultural sphere by Japanese
authorities, which continued until Korea's liberation in 1945.
From the late 1930s until 1945, the colonial government
pursued a policy of assimilation whose primary goal was to force
the Koreans to speak Japanese and to consider themselves Japanese
subjects. In 1937 the Japanese governor general ordered that all
instruction in Korean schools be in Japanese and that students
not be allowed to speak Korean either inside or outside of
school. In 1939 another decree "encouraged" Koreans to adopt
Japanese names, and by the following year it was reported that 84
percent of all Korean families had done so. During the war years
Korean-language newspapers and magazines were shut down. Belief
in the divinity of the Japanese emperor was encouraged, and
Shinto shrines were built throughout the country. Had Japanese
rule not ended in 1945, the fate of indigenous Korean language,
culture, and religious practices would have been extremely
uncertain
(see Korea and Japan
, ch. 2).
Japanese rule was harsh, particularly after the Japanese
militarists began their expansionist drive in the 1930s. Internal
Korean resistance, however, virtually ceased in the 1930s as the
police and the military gendarmes imposed strict surveillance
over all people suspected of subversive inclinations and meted
out severe punishment against recalcitrants. Most Koreans opted
to pay lip service to the colonial government. Others actively
collaborated with the Japanese. The treatment of collaborators
became a sensitive and sometimes violent issue during the years
immediately following liberation.
Data as of June 1990
|