Japanese Assimilation Policies In Colonial Korea 1910 1945

From the late nineteenth century, Japan sought to incorporate the Korean Peninsula into its expanding empire. Japan took control of Korea in 1910 and ruled it until the end of World War II. During this colonial period, Japan advertised as a national goal the assimilation of Koreans into the Japanese state. It never achieved that goal. Mark Caprio here examines why Japan's assimilation efforts failed. Utilizing government documents, personal travel accounts, diaries, newspapers, and works of fiction, he uncovers plenty of evidence for the potential for assimilation but very few practical initiatives to implement the policy. Japan's early history of colonial rule included tactics used with peoples such as the Ainu and Ryukyuan that tended more toward obliterating those cultures than to incorporating the people as equal Japanese citizens. Following the annexation of Taiwan in 1895, Japanese policymakers turned to European imperialist models, especially those of France and England, in developing strengthening its plan for assimilation policies. But, although Japanese used rhetoric that embraced assimilation, Japanese people themselves, from the top levels of government down, considered Koreans inferior and gave them few political rights. Segregation was built into everyday life. Japanese maintained separate communities in Korea, children were schooled in two separate and unequal systems, there was relatively limited intermarriage, and prejudice was ingrained. Under these circumstances, many Koreans resisted assimilation. By not actively promoting Korean-Japanese integration on the ground, Japan's rhetoric of assimilation remained just that.

From the late nineteenth century, Japan sought to incorporate the Korean Peninsula into its expanding empire. Japan took control of Korea in 1910 and ruled it until the end of World War II. During this colonial period, Japan advertised as a national goal the assimilation of Koreans into the Japanese state. It never achieved that goal. Mark Caprio here examines why Japan's assimilation efforts failed. Utilizing government documents, personal travel accounts, diaries, newspapers, and works of fiction, he uncovers plenty of evidence for the potential for assimilation but very few practical initiatives to implement the policy. Japan's early history of colonial rule included tactics used with peoples such as the Ainu and Ryukyuan that tended more toward obliterating those cultures than to incorporating the people as equal Japanese citizens. Following the annexation of Taiwan in 1895, Japanese policymakers turned to European imperialist models, especially those of France and England, in developing strengthening its plan for assimilation policies. But, although Japanese used rhetoric that embraced assimilation, Japanese people themselves, from the top levels of government down, considered Koreans inferior and gave them few political rights. Segregation was built into everyday life. Japanese maintained separate communities in Korea, children were schooled in two separate and unequal systems, there was relatively limited intermarriage, and prejudice was ingrained. Under these circumstances, many Koreans resisted assimilation. By not actively promoting Korean-Japanese integration on the ground, Japan's rhetoric of assimilation remained just that. Mark E. Caprio is a professor in the Department of Intercultural Communications, Rikkyo University, Tokyo. "There is no other publication in the English language that comes close to what Mark Caprio has achieved. His book will become required reading for anyone who wants to learn about Korea's experience under Japanese colonialism." - James Palais, University of Washington "The most original aspect of this study is the author's effort to place the Japanese policy of assimilation in a broad comparative context. What becomes abundantly clear from this comparison is that assimilation rarely works at all, and even when pursued with some vigor by a colonial regime at first it is eventually abandoned or profoundly altered....The book also presents many new materials - debates in the press, the views of prominent intellectual and political figures, policy documents-that will be of great interest, and often great fascination, to students of modern Japanese and Korean history." - Peter Duus, emeritus professor, Stanford University "An exceedingly well-researched and insightful work on an important topic. It will make a strong contribution to the field of Korean studies and, because of its comparative scope, will also be important to historians and students of modern Japan." - Michael Robinson, Indiana University

From the late nineteenth century, Japan sought to incorporate the Korean Peninsula into its expanding empire. Japan took control of Korea in 1910 and ruled it until the end of World War II. During this colonial period, Japan advertised as a national goal the assimilation of Koreans into the Japanese state. It never achieved that goal. Mark Caprio here examines why Japan's assimilation efforts failed. Utilizing government documents, personal travel accounts, diaries, newspapers, and works of fiction, he uncovers plenty of evidence for the potential for assimilation but very few practical initiatives to implement the policy. Japan's early history of colonial rule included tactics used with peoples such as the Ainu and Ryukyuan that tended more toward obliterating those cultures than to incorporating the people as equal Japanese citizens. Following the annexation of Taiwan in 1895, Japanese policymakers turned to European imperialist models, especially those of France and England, in developing strengthening its plan for assimilation policies. But, although Japanese used rhetoric that embraced assimilation, Japanese people themselves, from the top levels of government down, considered Koreans inferior and gave them few political rights. Segregation was built into everyday life. Japanese maintained separate communities in Korea, children were schooled in two separate and unequal systems, there was relatively limited intermarriage, and prejudice was ingrained. Under these circumstances, many Koreans resisted assimilation. By not actively promoting Korean-Japanese integration on the ground, Japan's rhetoric of assimilation remained just that. Mark E. Caprio is a professor in the Department of Intercultural Communications, Rikkyo University, Tokyo. "There is no other publication in the English language that comes close to what Mark Caprio has achieved. His book will become required reading for anyone who wants to learn about Korea's experience under Japanese colonialism." - James Palais, University of Washington "The most original aspect of this study is the author's effort to place the Japanese policy of assimilation in a broad comparative context. What becomes abundantly clear from this comparison is that assimilation rarely works at all, and even when pursued with some vigor by a colonial regime at first it is eventually abandoned or profoundly altered....The book also presents many new materials - debates in the press, the views of prominent intellectual and political figures, policy documents-that will be of great interest, and often great fascination, to students of modern Japanese and Korean history." - Peter Duus, emeritus professor, Stanford University "An exceedingly well-researched and insightful work on an important topic. It will make a strong contribution to the field of Korean studies and, because of its comparative scope, will also be important to historians and students of modern Japan." - Michael Robinson, Indiana University

Colonial Rule and Social Change in Korea 1910-1945 highlights the complex interaction between indigenous activity and colonial governance, emphasizing how Japanese rule adapted to Korean and missionary initiatives, as well as how Koreans found space within the colonial system to show agency. Topics covered range from economic development and national identity to education and family; from peasant uprisings and thought conversion to a comparison of missionary and colonial leprosariums. These various new assessments of Japan's colonial legacy may open up new and illuminating approaches to historical memory that will resonate not just in Korean studies, but in colonial and postcolonial studies in general, and will have implications for the future of regional politics in East Asia.

Assimilating Seoul, the first book-length study written in English about Seoul during the colonial period, challenges conventional nationalist paradigms by revealing the intersection of Korean and Japanese history in this important capital. Through microhistories of Shinto festivals, industrial expositions, and sanitation campaigns, Todd A. Henry offers a transnational account that treats the city’s public spaces as "contact zones," showing how residents negotiated pressures to become loyal, industrious, and hygienic subjects of the Japanese empire. Unlike previous, top-down analyses, this ethnographic history investigates modalities of Japanese rule as experienced from below. Although the colonial state set ambitious goals for the integration of Koreans, Japanese settler elites and lower-class expatriates shaped the speed and direction of assimilation by bending government initiatives to their own interests and identities. Meanwhile, Korean men and women of different classes and generations rearticulated the terms and degree of their incorporation into a multiethnic polity. Assimilating Seoul captures these fascinating responses to an empire that used the lure of empowerment to disguise the reality of alienation.

"Between 1876 and 1945, thousands of Japanese civilians—merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and adventurers—left their homeland for a new life on the Korean peninsula. Although most migrants were guided primarily by personal profit and only secondarily by national interest, their mundane lives and the state’s ambitions were inextricably entwined in the rise of imperial Japan. Despite having formed one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century, these settlers and their empire-building activities have all but vanished from the public memory of Japan’s presence in Korea. Drawing on previously unused materials in multi-language archives, Jun Uchida looks behind the official organs of state and military control to focus on the obscured history of these settlers, especially the first generation of “pioneers” between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated the colonial management of Korea as its grassroots movers and shakers. By uncovering the downplayed but dynamic role played by settler leaders who operated among multiple parties—between the settler community and the Government-General, between Japanese colonizer and Korean colonized, between colony and metropole—this study examines how these “brokers of empire” advanced their commercial and political interests while contributing to the expansionist project of imperial Japan."

"A gem to be consulted by all students of anthropology, history, ethnomusicology, and colonial studies." Hyung Il Pal, author of Constructing "Korean" Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State Formation Theories --

Although a bit scholarly this book is a timely addition to current happenings in Asia.