No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Korea, A Unique Colony: Last to be Colonized and First to Revolt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
This article discusses Japan's colonization of Korea in the context of world time. Korea was a unique colony as it was one of 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, Japanese leaders adopted a “modern” practice by starting the imperial “cultural policy” in mid-1919. The most important consequence of the cultural policy was the integral role Korean industry soon had in linking the metropole with hinterland economies, and it is from this point that we can date Japan's specific brand of architectonic capitalism that has influenced Northeast Asia down to the present.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 2021
References
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.
4 Ramon 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 in Colonial 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: University of 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 1984
12 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: Trade and Import-Substitution Policies for Developing Countries (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 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.
You have
Access