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South Korea THE JAPANESE ROLE IN KOREA'S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The Japanese, who dominated Korea from the late 1890s to 1945
and who governed Korea as a colony from 19l0 to 1945, were
responsible for the initial economic modernization of Korea.
Before 1900 Korea had a relatively backward agricultural economy.
According to scholar Donald S. Macdonald, for centuries most
Koreans lived as subsistence farmers of rice and other grains and
satisfied most of their basic needs through their own labor or
through barter. The manufactures of traditional Korea--
principally cloth, cooking and eating utensils, furniture,
jewelry, and paper--were produced by artisans in a few population
centers.
Following the annexation of Korea in 19l0, Japan thrust a
modern blend of industrial capitalism onto a feudal agrarian
society. By the end of the colonial period, Japan had built an
extensive infrastructure of roads, railroads, ports, electrical
power, and government buildings that facilitated both the
modernization of Korea's economy and Japan's control over the
modernization process. The Japanese located various heavy
industries--steel, chemicals, and hydroelectric power--across
Korea, but mainly in the north.
The Japanese government played an even more active role in
developing Korea than it had played in developing the Japanese
economy in the late nineteenth century. Many programs drafted in
Korea in the 1920s and 1930s originated in policies drafted in
Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1912). The Japanese
government helped to mobilize resources for development and
provided entrepreneurial leadership for these new enterprises.
Colonial economic growth was initiated through powerful
government efforts to expand the economic infrastructure, to
increase investment in human capital through health and
education, and to raise productivity.
In some respects, South Korean patterns of development after
the early 1960s closely followed the methodology introduced by
the Japanese fifty years earlier--industrialization from above
using a strong bureaucracy that formulated and implemented
economic policies. Many of the developments that took place in
Chosen, the Japanese name for Korea during the period of
colonization, had also occurred in pre-World War II Japan; they
were implementation of a strong education system and the spread
of literacy; the rise of a strong, authoritarian government that
combined civilian and military administration to govern the state
with strict discipline; the fostering and implementation of
comprehensive economic programs by the state through its control
of the huge national bureaucracy; the close collaboration between
government and business leaders; and the development of
industries by the major Japanese zaibatsu (commercial
conglomerates).
Some political analysts, for example, Bruce Cumings and Gavan
McCormick, have been impressed with the common elements in prewar
and postwar economic growth in South Korea and especially with
top-down government management of the economy. Economists, such
as Paul W. Kuznets, however, also draw attention to the
dysfunctional aspects of the colonial legacy and find some of the
discontinuities important.
It is also important to note that between the end of World
War II and Park Chung Hee's ascension to power in 1961, there was
a major rupture, both politically and economically, from the
Japanese colonial period. There was considerable disruption after
1945 because of plant exhaustion; the loss of linkages with
Japanese capital and with upstream and downstream industrial
facilities; the loss of technical expertise, distribution
systems, and markets; and the subsequent obliteration of the
industrial plant during the Korean War (1950-53).
Data as of June 1990
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