The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus

Volume 19 | Issue 21 | Number 2 | Article ID 5646 | Nov 01, 2021

Korea, A Unique Colony: Last to be Colonized and First to
RevoltBruce Cumings

Abstract: This article discusses Japan’scolonization of Korea in the context of worldtime. Korea was a unique colony as it was oneof the last to be colonized in the world.
Japanese colonizers pushed a heavy-handed"military policy", mainly because of the sharp
resistance at their accession to power in the
period 1905-1910. In 1919 when mass
movements swept colonial and semi-colonial
countries, including Egypt and Ireland, Koreans
too rose up against Japan’s rule. Stung by wide
resistance by Koreans in March and April 1919
as well as general foreign reproach, Japaneseleaders adopted a "modern" practice bystarting the imperial "cultural policy" in
mid-1919. The most important consequence ofthe cultural policy was the integral role Korean
industry soon had in linking the metropole withhinterland economies, and it is from this pointthat we can date Japan's specific brand ofarchitectonic capitalism that has influenced
Northeast Asia down to the present.

The Japanese occupation of Korea

Several characteristics of Korea's imperial
experience distinguish it from other colonies.1
First, it was “late” in world time. King Leopoldof Belgium said in 1866 that “the world ispretty well pillaged already,” marking theviolent spread of European colonialism acrossthe globe. Japan's annexation of Korea wasalmost half a century later. By that time anticolonial ideas and movements had spread,particularly in England and the United States;
Japan had barely got going with its colonial
project when Woodrow Wilson issued his 14
points, calling for self-determination of allnations.

Keywords: Empire, world system, colonization,stMarch 1 Movement

A second characteristic explains why Japan and
Korea have a shared modern history sodaunting and unnerving, like fingernails being
scraped across a blackboard. It is because theirrelationship is more akin to Germany andFrance or England and Ireland, than it is to
Belgium and Zaire or Portugal andMozambique. Global colonialism is often
thought to have created new nations where1

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none existed before, to draw new boundaries
and bring diverse tribes and peoples together,out of a welter of geographic units divided
along ethnic, racial, religious or tribal lines.
But all of this existed in Korea for centuries
before l9l0. Korea had ethnic and linguistic
unity and long-recognized national boundaries
well before the peoples of Europe attained
them. Furthermore, by virtue of their relative
proximity to China, Koreans had always felt
superior to Japan at best, or equal at worst.

Theodore Roosevelt. Japan got the empire the
British and Americans wanted it to have, andonly sought to organize an exclusive regional
sphere when the other powers did the same,after the collapse of the world economy in the
1930s (and even then their attempt was halfhearted, and even then the development
program was "orthodoxly western");2
In the first decade of their rule Japanesecolonizers pushed a heavy-handed "military
policy" (budan seiji), mainly because of the
sharp resistance at their accession to power inthe period 1905-1910; even classroom teachers
wore uniforms and carried swords. The
Government-General stood above Koreansociety, exercising authoritative and coercive
control. Its connections were only to theremnant upper class and colonial parvenus andeven these were tenuous, designed to co-opt
and thwart dissent, not to give Koreans ameaningful role in the state apparatus. The
Japanese unquestionably strengthened central
bureaucratic power in Korea, demolishing theold balance and tension with the landed
aristocracy; operating from the top down, theyeffectively penetrated below the county level
and into the villages for the first time, and insome ways neither post-colonial Korean state
has ever gotten over it: Korea today is still acountry with remarkably little local autonomy.
Added to the old county-level pivot of central
magistrate, local clerks and landed families,
was a centrally-controlled, highly mobile
national police force, responsive to the centerand possessing its own communications andtransportation facilities. For decades blackcoated policemen kept order and helped "bringin the harvest," manning the ramparts of therice production circuit from paddyfield to
middleman to storehouse to export platform,
and thence to Japan.

Instead of creation the Japanese engaged in
substitution after l9l0: exchanging a Japaneseruling elite for the Korean yangban scholarofficials, most of whom were either co-opted or
dismissed; instituting colonial imperative
coordination for the old central stateadministration; exchanging Japanese modern
education for the Confucian classics; building
Japanese capital and expertise in place of theincipient Korean versions, Japanese talent for
Korean talent; eventually even replacing the
Korean language with Japanese.
Koreans never thanked the Japanese for thesesubstitutions, did not credit Japan withcreations, and instead saw Japan as snatchingaway the ancien regime, Korea's sovereignty
and independence, its indigenous if incipient
modernization, and above all its national
dignity. Unlike some other colonial peoples,
therefore, most Koreans never saw Japaneserule as anything but illegitimate andhumiliating. Furthermore, the very closeness ofthe two nations--in geography, in common
Chinese cultural influences, indeed in levels ofdevelopment until the late l9th century--madeJapanese dominance all the more galling to
Koreans, and gave a peculiar intensity to therelationship, a hate/respect dynamic thatsuggested to Koreans, "there but for accidentsof history go we."In 1919 mass movements swept colonial andsemi-colonial countries, including Egypt and
Ireland, and Korea was no exception. What
made Korea special was the nonviolent nature

Third, quite apart from the anachronism ofcolonizing Korea, Japan had crucial great
power support, particularly from Pres.
2

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inaugurated a period of "gradualist" resistanceto colonialism, in which Koreans took
advantage of relaxed restrictions on theirfreedom of speech and assembly to organize avariety of nationalist, socialist and communist
groups, some openly and some clandestinely.
Now Korean newspapers could be bought once
again, and many other Korean-language
publications appeared in the early 1920s.
Writers like Yi Kwang-su became famous fornovels in a nationalist vernacular, and others
like Chông In-bo and Ch'oe Nam-sôn deepened
studies of Korean history, examining the
Tan'gun legend and the historical "soul" of
Korea.5of the March First Movement, anticipating
Gandhi's tactics in India. Drawing upon
Woodrow Wilson's promises of selfdetermination, a group of thirty-three
intellectuals petitioned for independence fromJapan on March 1 and touched off nation-widemass protests that continued for months.
Japanese national and military police could notcontain this revolt, and had to call in the armyand even the navy. At least half a million
Koreans took part in demonstrations in Marchand April, with disturbances in more than 600
different places. In one of the most notorious
episodes, Japanese gendarmes locked
protesters inside a church and burned it to theground. In the end, Japanese officials counted
553 killed and over 12,000 arrested, but
Korean nationalist sources put the totals at
7,500 killed and 45,000 arrested.

American missionaries were divided in theirjudgement of the March First Movement. All ofthem were appalled at the violence of thecolonial authorities, but many also blamed
radicals and agitators for provoking theviolence. Most applauded the new "cultural
policies" after 1919, and echoed Japanesejustifications for the new course. The Resident
Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
Herbert Welch, wrote in May 1920 that while
many Koreans still demand immediate
independence, "some of the most intelligent
and far-seeing" Koreans

It is also interesting that Koreans had provided
a stark contrast with Japan's other colony in
Taiwan. Even after the rebellion in Korea andthe watershed May Fourth Movement in China,
an observant American traveler noted thatquite a few Taiwanese wore Japanese clothes,whereas "I cannot recall ever having seen a
Korean in getas and kimono." There was a big"independence question" in Korea, he wrote,but "Independence, if it is ever considered at
all in Taiwan, is evidently regarded as hopeless,not even worth thinking about."3 Perhaps themost revealing remark ever made about thedifferences between colonial Taiwan andcolonial Korea was one official's statement that"what can be done with incentives in Taiwan
must be done with coercion in Korea."4...are persuaded that there is no hope of
speedy independence, and that they mustsettle down for a long period to build up
the Korean people, in physical conditions,in knowledge, in morality, and in the bility
to handle government concerns....6
This, of course, was Japanese Premier Hara
Kei's justification for the new "cultural policy,"to prepare Koreans "in due course" (Hara's
words) for a distant day of independence. A
colonial administrator, Nitobe Inazö, explained
the rationale this way in 1919:

Stung by Korean resistance, Wilson and Lenin,
and general foreign reproach, Japanese leaderssuddenly understood that they were colonizers
in the wrong century: wanting always to be"modern," they found their repressive rulecondemned as out of date. So mid-1919 marked
the start of the imperial "cultural policy"(bunka seiji), of tutoring Koreans toward a
distant day of independence. The new policy

I count myself among the best and truest
friends of Koreans. I like them.... I thinkthey are a capable people who can betrained to a large measure of self3

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government, for which the present is aperiod of tutelage. Let them study what weare doing in Korea, and this I say not tojustify the many mistakes committed byour militaristic administration, nor to boastof some of our achievements. In all
humility, but with a firm conviction thatJapan is a steward on whom devolves thegigantic task of the uplifting of the Far
East, I cannot think that the young Korea
is yet capable of governing itself.7

in supporting Korean independence;
furthermore their social base within Korea wasvery slim. The socialists had the disadvantage
of Japanese police action, which targeted andwalked off to jail anyone espousing "Bolshevik"
ideas, and the advantage of a potentially large
mass base and a spirit of sacrifice on behalf of
Korea, so that by the end of the 1920s they
were leading the Korean resistance movement.
As the leading scholar of Korean communism,
Dae-sook Suh, put it, leftists and communists

Christian opposition to the Japanese is both afact and a legend. The churches weresanctuaries in times of violence, like the 1919
independence movement, and many Westernmissionaries encouraged underdog andegalitarian impulses. But the post-1945 imageof Syngman Rhee and other pro-American
politicians as great Christian leaders andresistors to colonialism is false:...succeeded in wresting control of the
Korean revolution from the Nationalists;they planted a deep core of Communist
influence among the Korean people,
particularly the students, youth groups,
laborers and peasants. Their fortitude and,at times, obstinate determination to
succeed had a profound influence on
Korean intellectuals and writers. To theolder Koreans, who had groveled so long
before seemingly endless foreign
suppression, communism seemed a newhope and a magic touch.... For Koreans ingeneral, the sacrifices of the Communists,
if not the idea of communism, made strong
appeal, far stronger than any occasionalbomb- throwing exercise of the
Nationalists. The haggard appearance of
the Communists suffering from torture,
their stern and disciplined attitude toward
the common enemy of all Koreans, had afar-reaching effect on people.9

Men like Syngman Rhee and Kim Kyu-sik
went to missionary schools like Pai Chailess for their Christianity than to look forpolitical position through English.
Enrollment at Pai Chai decline when
English was de-emphasized; in 1905,
within a day or two of enrollment, 'half theschool had gone elsewhere in search ofEnglish.'It is the humble among Koreans who have truly
been drawn to Christianity: at the turn of the
century, "conversions among the 30,000 of
Seoul's outcast butcher class soon became 'oneof the most remarkable features of evangelicalefforts.'" 8 The hierarchy of Korean society
pushed commoners toward the egalitarian idealof everyone the same before God.

By the same token, the 1930s were much morepolarized than the previous decade; Japanese
put immense pressure on prominent Koreans tocollaborate; the tragedy of Koreancollaboration can be seen in a person like Ch'oe
Rin, a key leader of the March First Movement,
who by 1938 was giving speeches lauding "theYamato people" and "the eternal, single-family
lineage of the [Japanese] Imperial
Household," 1 0 or a great modernizer andnationalist like Yun Ch'i-ho accepting a positionin the House of Peers, or the alacrity withThe largest split, however, brought Korea into
the mainstream of world history after WorldWar I: it was between liberal idealism andsocialism, between Wilson and Lenin. Liberals
had the advantage of association with Wilson's
ideals of self-determination, and thedisadvantage that the U.S. was not interested4

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APJ | JFchanged into a "metanational greater
regionalism:" for scholars like Hirano
Yoshitarō, tōyō could extend beyond the East
Asian nation states, but was still to be
distinguished from imperialism, where "themother country is pitted against the colony."12

which the leaders of business like Kim Sông-su
threw their lot in with the big Japanese
zaibatsu and profited from the war.
These were people who would have beennatural leaders of an independent and selfconfident Korea, harbingers of a middle-classrevolution. But because of their collaboration(under tremendous Japanese pressure to be
sure, but then others continued to resist in
spite of that) the Japanese succeeded incompromising the emergence of a modern,liberal elite.

Japan is among the very few imperial powers tohave located modern heavy industry in its
colonies: steel, chemicals, hydroelectricfacilities in Korea and Manchuria, andautomobile production for a time in the latter.
According to Samuel Ho, by the end of thecolonial period Taiwan "had an industrial
superstructure to provide a strong foundation
for future industrialization": the mainindustries were hydroelectric, metallurgy(especially aluminum), chemicals, and an
advanced transport system. By 1941, factory
employment, including mining, stood at
181,000 in Taiwan. Manufacturing grew at anannual average rate of about 8 percent during
the 1930s.13

One of the longest-running influences of the
March 1 Movement is also the least
appreciated. It convinced Japanese leaders to
try and co-opt moderate Korean leaders andisolate radical ones. Under the new "cultural
policy," Korean commerce began to grow. One
source argued for "a tremendous increase in
the number of Korean entrepreneurs," but by
the end of the decade Koreans still held only
about three per cent of total paid-up capital.
Most Korean capitalists were still wholesalers,
brokers and merchants dealing in grain or
grain-based liquor transactions, with thisactivity mushrooming in the new ports.

Industrial development was much greater in
Korea, perhaps because of the relative failureof agrarian growth compared to Taiwan but
certainly because of Korea's closeness both toJapan and to the Chinese hinterland (see tables
2 and 3). By 1940, 213,000 Koreans were
working in industry, excluding miners, and notcounting the hundreds of thousands of Koreans
who migrated to factory or mine work in Japan
proper and in Manchuria. Net value of mining
and manufacturing grew by 266 percent
between 1929 and 1941.14 By 1945 Korea had
an industrial infrastructure that, althoughsharply skewed toward metropolitan interests,
was among the best developed in the Third
World. Furthermore, both Korea and Taiwan
had begun to take on semiperipheral
characteristics. Korea's developing periphery
was Manchuria, where it sent workers,
merchants, soldiers, and bureaucrats who
occupied a middle position between Japanese
overlords and Chinese peasants; as Korean rice
was shipped to Japan, millet was imported from

The most important fruit of the cultural policy
for Korean industry was the integral role itsoon had in Japan's "administrative guidance"of the entire Northeast Asian regional
economy. Now Korea was to play a part inplans linking the metropole with hinterland
economies, and it is from this point that we candate Japan's specific brand of architectonic
capitalism that has influenced Northeast Asia
down to the present. 1 1 Stefan Tanaka hasargued that as Japan embarked on imperial
conquests on the mainland, in the discourse oftōyōshi (Oriental or East Asian history, a kindof nativism) Korea and Manchuria became
mere "regions", often lumped together as asmansen (Manshu and Chosen). If this had
primarily a political-economic aspect until the
Sino-Japanese War began, this concept soon5

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In conclusion let me ask a question that rarely
gets voiced: when all is said and done what did
Japan get out its takeover of Korea? With thebenefit of more than a century of hindsight,
was it worth it? Eleven decades later, Japan's
relationship with the Republic of Korea is still
fraught with issues left over from the colonial
period, particularly the ultimate fate of thesexual slaves or “comfort women.” But what
Japanese colonizer could have imagined
another half of Korea, formed in 1948 as ananti-Japanese state, led by the colonial
resistance, with which Japan still has no formal
relations in 2019 and this country is now armed
with nuclear weapons and missiles. This is howcolonialism produces utterly unanticipatednightmares.

Manchuria to feed Korean peasants in a classic
core-semiperiphery-periphery relationship. As
for Taiwan, its geographic proximity toSoutheast Asia and South China made it "anatural location for processing certain raw
materials brought in from, and for producing
some manufactured goods for export to, theseareas."15
We see the kernel of this logic in the
Government-General's Industrial Commissionof 1921, which for the first time called forsupports to Korea's fledgling textile industry
and for it to produce not just for the domestic
market, but especially for exports to the Asian
continent, where Korean goods would have a
price advantage. This was by no means a purely"top-down" exercise, either, for Koreans werepart of the Commission and quickly called forstate subsidies and hothouse "protection" forKorean companies. The nurturing of a Koreanbusiness class was a necessity if Japan’s newpolicy of "gradualism" was to have any
meaning, and this was in effect its birthday
party--although a controversial one (three days
before the Commission opened, two bombs
were thrown into the Government-Generalbuilding).16 That Japan had much larger ideas inmind, however, is obvious in the proposal for"General Industrial Policy" put before the 1921
conference:

In Japan, a unitary and free country, theunwillingness of most historians honestly toassess their imperial history is a constantinsinuation that the imperial impulse may still
not be dead. With Japan's record in China,
perhaps there is some sincere reflection. Thereis almost none in regard to Japan's activities in
Korea. The twentieth century began withJapan's defeat of Russia and its slow rise
toward global stature, that, as it drew nearer,
also drew Japan toward disaster like a moth
toward a flame. England and America were thePacific powers of the first half of this century,and they welcomed Japan as a junior partner
but not as a hegemon. Japan still has to deal
with lingering apprehensions about its ability tolive comfortably with the rest of the world, andthose apprehensions are nowhere greater thanamong its near neighbors. Japan is Icarus,
running toward the sun.

Since Korea is a part of the imperial
domain, industrial plans for Korea should
be in conformity with imperial industrial
policy. Such a policy must provide for
economic conditions in adjacent areas,
based on [Korea's] geographical position
amid Japan, China, and the Russian Far
East.
One of the Japanese delegates explained that
Korean industry would be integral to overallplanning going on in Tokyo, and would require
some protection if it were to accept its proper
place in "a single, coexistent, co prosperous
Japanese-Korean unit.”6

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This article is a part of The Special Issue: A Longue Durée Revolution in Korea: March
1st, 1919 to the Candlelight Revolution in 2018. Please see the Table of Contents.
Bruce Cumings is Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History andthe College at the University of Chicago. He is an Asia-Paciﬁc Journal associate and his
publications include The Origins of the Korean War and North Korea: Another Country as well
as Dominion from Sea to Sea: Paciﬁc Ascendancy and American Power. He has also written for
the New York Review of Books, the New Left Review, the London Review of Books, and the
Nation.

Notes
1*For the symposium on the March 1st Movement held in Seoul March 28-29, 2019, I was
asked to give a PowerPoint speech. Since I came to certain firm conclusions about March 1st
many years ago, I asked myself if I still thought these generalizations were true. I did. So
what follows is mostly drawn from my 2005 book, Korea’s Place in the Sun. Had they asked
for a paper, I would have been obligated to say something new.
2
Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945, pp. 3-4, 15, 20,
25-27. Iriye dates Japanese plans for an exclusive Northeast Asian regional hegemony from
1936, but according to him it still did not have a blueprint in 1939, and was still dependent on
the core powers in system until the middle of 1941.
3
Franck, Harry A., Glimpses of Japan and Formosa (New York: The Century Co., 1924),pp.
183-84.
4Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 42.
5
The best account of the post-1919 changes is in Robinson, Michael. Cultural Nationalism inColonial Korea, 1920-25. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988.
6
Quoted in Alleyne Ireland, The New Korea (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1926), p.
70.
7
Quoted in Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1993), p. 248.
8
Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1968), p. 207.
9
Suh, Dae-sook, The Korean Communist Movement, 1918-48. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1967), p. 132.
10
Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch'ang Kims and the Origins of Korean
Capitalism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991,p. 231.
11
Bruce Cumings, "The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy,"
International Organization, winter 198412
Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, pp. 247-57.
13
Samuel P. Ho, The Economic Development of Taiwan, 1860-1970 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1978), pp. 70-90; Lin Ching-yuan, Industrialization in Taiwan, 1946-7: Tradeand Import-Substitution Policies for Developing Countries (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp.
7

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19-22.
14
Edward S. Mason, The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea(Harvard University East Asian Monographs, 1981), pp. 76,78.
15
Lin, Industrialization in Taiwan, p. 19.
16
Eckert, Offspring of Empire, pp. 44, 82-84.

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