Colonial Development (1910-1945)

The period of Japanese occupation of Korea for thirty six years had exerted a profound influence on Korea. In the earlier part of colonial rule, Imperial Japan attempted to transform Korea to underpin its military operation. Since the late 1930s, economic regionalism based on the wartime economy was introduced. Japanese colonial development had distinctive features that set it apart from colonial development elsewhere (Myers and Petrie, 1984). At the time of the Japanese colonisation of Korea, Japan was a ‘later industrialiser’ based on Prussian ‘late industrialisation’ in which the state led the formation of the political economy in order to overcome the backwardness. In Japan, ‘it was the state that conceived of modernisation as a goal and industrialisation as a means, that gave birth to the new economy of haste and pushed it unrelentingly as an ambitions mother would to her child prodigy’ (Landes, 1965, 182).

Moreover, unlike the huge gap in capitalist development and industrialisation between the colonised of the Third World and their Western colonisers, Japan and Korea had a similar political and social development. The Japanese could not achieve an overwhelming superiority to Korea. Hence, Japan could not legitimise its colonisation of Korea based on a ‘civilising mission’. The Japanese focused on destroying the Confucian traditions in pursuit of modernising itself and its colonies (Lee, H.-k., 1990, 73-74) in the 1910s and 1920s.

In 1910, the Government-General was established as a supreme colonial state institution with monopolistic stances on legislative, administrative and judicial sectors. Its headquarters were in Seoul and its sub-organisations and local governments placed under the direct control of the Governor-General. The Governor Generals were directly subordinate to the Japanese prime minister who ruled Korea. During colonial rule, there were eight Governor-Generals in Korea. All of them were high-ranking Japanese military officers: Terauchi Masatake (1910-1916), Hasegawa Hodo (1916-1919), Saito Makoto (1919-1927),

1942), Koiso Kuniaki (1942 to 1944), and Abe Nobuyuki (1944 to August 1945). Among them, Saito Makoto was from the Navy and the rest of them came from the Army. The Japanese colonial administration of Korea stressed the supplementary role in preparing a future war with China (USA. Department of Army, 1992, 20; Kwon, S.-y, 2013, 194).

Japanese colonial rule demolished the neo-Confucian traditional institutions and carried out drastic reform by introducing a modern bureaucratic and authoritarian state apparatus. The Japanese occupation of Korea went through several phases. From 1911 to 1918, Japan performed cadastral surveys to transfer land ownership to Japanese. However, Japan did not dismantle the traditional landlord system in South Korea. The traditional landlord class was allowed to maintain the tenure as long as they did not oppose Japanese rule. Japan’s confiscation of land focused on weak ownership and public and royal possession. As a result, almost 70 percent of the arable land was owned by landlords and the tenure system extracted 75 percent of the harvest. Among the farmed land, 17 percent was owned by Japanese landlords and the rest was owned by Korean landlords who collaborated with the colonial government (Kim, J.-p., 1988, 106).

During the colonial rule, Korean traditional agriculture, based on rice and other grains, had remained central in the Korean economy. The Imperial Japan had integrated the economy of Korea into a regional division of labour. Japan had set the pattern of colonial development in Korea as an ‘agricultural appendage’ of Japan. The Imperial Japan primarily considered Korea as a source of food for Japan’s expanding population and a market for Japanese goods. Industrialisation was retarded and the middle-class were not strengthened (Henderson, 1968, 94; Macdonald, 1990, 19).

The role of an agrarian hinterland for the Japanese Empire resulted from geographical constraints. As Korea is positioned in the north eastern region of the Asian monsoon area, the Korean peninsula has a very hot and rainy summer with a freezing and dry winter. This geographical feature produces conspicuous constraints in agricultural productivity (Bartz, 1972, 25-28).

In most of the rice cultivation regions in Far East Asia, double or triple cropping of rice for a year is common. Triple cropping is possible from the tropical areas to the southern part of Taiwan and double-cropping in the northern half of Taiwan. In contrast, rice cultivation in Japan and Korea is characterised by a single crop per year during in summer period and a long stoppage in winter. Moreover, the rice cultivation was entirely reliant on hydroponic farms which required massively organised inputs of labour forces to control water. In spite of the heavy input of labour forces in the summer, the productivity of agriculture

stayed low due to the long halt of agricultural activities in the winter. Due to this low productivity, Japan could not industrialise the agricultural sector by introducing plantation- style farms found in the other colonised states of tropical Asia. Therefore, most of the peasants in Korea remained bound to the land and engaged in low-productivity agriculture in the rural lands, which restricted the potential supply of labour forces into the industrial sectors and thus retarding urbanisation (Koo, 1987, 166).

As Table III-1 indicates, shares of manufacturing and mining slightly increased in the late 1930s and the early 1940s when Japan was engaged in the war with China. During the wartime period, there had been a massive investment on facilities for heavy industry on a large scale in North Korea due to availability of natural resources and its geographical proximity in the war with China (Eckert et al., 1990, 310; Ekbladh, 2003, 177).

Table III-1 Change of industrial structure in Korea, 1919-1941

(Percentage of net commodity product) 1910-12 1919-21 1929-31 1939-41 Agriculture, forestry and fisheries 95.9 92.7 88.3 73.6

Manufacturing and mining 4.1 7.3 11.7 26.4

Total 100 100 100 100

(Lee, J.-w., 1993, 25).

This regional peculiarity was the root cause of the serious industrial backwardness of South Korea when the Korean economy was abruptly separated from the Japanese economic system in 1945 (Chowdhury and Islam, 1993, 35-36). Moreover, Cumings argued that massive numbers of peasants in North Korea were uprooted to be employed in heavy- industry. This coercive mobilisation fostered the social basis for the radical anti-capitalist sentiments in the North, which ultimately led to the Korean War (Cumings, 1981).

For the initial nine years, the colonial government maintained an oppressive military- style rule. Nine years after annexation, the Koreans rose up against the Japanese by demanding independence in what was known as the March First Movement. On 1 Mar 1919, 33 designated leaders’ proclaimed the independence of Korea in Seoul. The proclamation galvanised the Korean people into a nation-wide uprising. This movement was stimulated by American President Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination when he was

Korean intellectuals who came to believe that Korea could claim self-determination from Japan (Caprio, 2009, 47).

Japan suppressed the uprising harshly. However, the uprising laid the foundations for the rise of nationalism in Korea. After the event, many nationalist leaders left Korea to continue the independence movement in exile. The overseas nationalist movement emerged in China, Manchuria, and Russia under the support of Korean communities. In America, a small number of émigrés initiated an independence movement. The overseas resistance to Japan had ideologically split into the left and the right due to the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution. The left collaborated with the USSR and Mao’s Communist Army. The right worked with Chiang Kai-Shek, General of China and the USA during the war. After the collapse of Japanese colonial rule, these divisions developed into ideological camps, which became the origin of the division of Korea (Robinson, 1988: Macdonald, 1990, 42-43; Lee, B.-k., 2003).

In the 1930s and the 1940s, Japan introduced drastic and totalitarian policies of assimilation and a wartime mobilisation system, which was a response to the Japanese ruler’s concerns. From the late 1920s, Communism was smuggled among the intellectuals in Japan and subsequently became disseminated among radical intellectuals in Korea. In 1930, The Great Depression hit Japan hard, which weakened the political base for liberal democracy and led to a rise of nationalist and militarist ideology (Kwon, S.-y, 2013, 200-219).

From this background, Japan tightened its policy towards Korea in order to increase internal cohesiveness and to prepare for war mobilisation (Seth, 2011, 193). The Japanese colonisation of Korea was ‘unique in its subjugation of a racially and culturally similar people. The Japanese repeatedly listed their similarities with Koreans as the primary reason why they could integrate rather than colonise Koreans (Caprio, 2009. 7).

During the war, the Japanese embarked on a radical assimilation policy to eradicate the differences between the Japanese and the Koreans and merge them into a single cultural and ethnic body. The Japanese assimilation projects stands in contrast to the Celtic assimilation into the United Kingdom. Michael Hechter claimed that the Celtic, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish were colonised by England but retained a separate identity (Hechter, 1975).

Under the slogans of ‘Japan and Korea as one body’ and ‘harmony between Japan and Korea’. Minami Jirō a Governor-General, (1936-1942) forced Koreans to register at Shinto and to attend Shinto rituals in 1936. The use of the Korean language in the schools was extremely restricted and exclusive use of the Japanese language was ordered after 1938. In late 1939, the government issued the Name Order, by which Koreans were to change their

names to Japanese ones. Eventually, about 84 percent of Koreans complied and adopted new names. Japan also prohibited the use of the Korean language. Korean-language newspapers were ordered to be closed in 1940 and by the early 1940s, the publication of all Korean books ceased. By 1943 students could be punished for speaking Korean at school (Seth, 2011, 296- 297).

However, this radical assimilation policy was not successful due to the language barrier. According to a Japanese source in 1943, around 23 percent of Koreans understood the Japanese language and among them only 12 percent without any difficulties. As most of the Koreans could not speak Japanese, this linguistic barrier limited social interaction between Japanese rulers and common Koreans (Seth, 2011, 296-297).

With the outbreak of war between Japan and China in 1937, Japan had introduced a radical wartime mobilisation system. Koreans were mobilised into civilian labour and military conscription on a large scale for the war. All types of Korean organisations became banned, which were replaced by new types of organisations and institutions under the control of the colonial government, which were used to legitimise Japan’s invasion of China and introduce war mobilisation. The Japanese colonial rule abruptly ended when the military forces of the USA and the USSR occupied the Korean peninsula in 1945 (Seth, 2011, p, 294).