When historians comparing modern empires examine the Japanese Empire's colonial rule, one of the biggest puzzles is its adamant adherence to the principle of assimilationism. Even in the 1920s, when almost all the Western empires, including France's, denounced the model as costly and inhumane, the Japanese raised the banner of assimilationism—or the policy of “extending the mainland”—and implemented new measures to both integrate and differentiate colonized populations. Many elements contributed to Japan's interwar fixation on assimilationist rhetoric. One was the emphasis in Japanese political discourse on the ethnic “sameness” between the Japanese and colonial populations.Footnote 1 For instance, after the mass independence demonstrations in the 1919 March First Movement, or Korea's “Wilsonian Moment,” Prime Minister Hara Takashi argued, “The desire of most Koreans is not for independence, but to be treated as equals of the Japanese. I intend to see to it that the Koreans have such equal opportunities in education, industry, and government position, as well as to undertake reform of local government along the same lines it has proceeded in Japan.”Footnote 2 To Japan's imperialists, a stress on the “sameness,” combined with their aspiration to challenge white dominance, made assimilationism appear to better position the Japanese Empire within the moral standard of colonial practices.Footnote 3
Historians of the Japanese Empire are well-aware of its assimilationist rule, but few have recognized it as a striking diversion from the international norms of the post-World War I period.Footnote 4 This is perhaps because Japanese policymakers and theorists, whether Gotō Shinpei or Hara Takashi, Nitobe Inazō or Yanaihara Tadao, were heavily influenced by Western theories and practices, and unlikely to have ignored the contemporary international norms. Consequently, historians of European empires and those of the Japanese Empire have formed opposite impressions of Japanese colonial strategy. The former perceived Japan to have operated on its own terms, while the latter saw Japan as having keenly followed a mixture of Western models.
This article argues that both are correct, but not by examining the genealogy or discursive tides of Japan's assimilationism.Footnote 5 Instead, I highlight how entangled imperial and transnational contexts shaped the contours of Japanese assimilationist rule at the bureaucratic, policymaking level. By looking beyond the overlay of propaganda and examining the conduct of mid-level colonial officials, we can see how the configuration of external and internal influences made Japanese colonialism both typical and unique.
Despite the risk of overemphasizing a top-down view, there is good reason to focus on the mindsets of mid-level officials in order to grasp the logic and practice of assimilationist rule. In colonial Korea, colonial bureaucrats rather than private citizens and organizations took the main responsibility for realizing Japan's assimilationist ideal before increasingly critical international and domestic audiences. The Japanese built a dense apparatus of bureaucracy in the colonies; 48,808 civil servants (including both Japanese and Koreans of all ranks) ruled roughly twenty million people in Korea as of 1930.Footnote 6 In comparison to French Algeria, where the large number of European settlers pressured officials through institutionalized venues and complicated political decision-making, bureaucrats in Korea exercised a greater authoritarian power vis-à-vis private Japanese settlers and Korean subjects.Footnote 7 Although their presence has been overshadowed in historiography by Japanese prime ministers, colonial governors-general, and even private settlers, colonial bureaucrats were far from silent. They played a decisive role in the everyday conduct of commerce, journalism, education, and many other fields.
Among the fields closely run by bureaucrats, social work (shakai jigyō), in particular, embodied both the ideals and contradictions of Japanese assimilationism. Social work and welfare were theorized and professionalized in many advanced economies in the early twentieth century. Social work's growing importance characterized the post-World War I moment, when society suffered unfavorable consequences of industrialization and war and, from the perspective of state officials, grew more contentious. It became a major realm of confrontation in party politics in many industrialized nations.Footnote 8 In the colonial world, officials began to consider native welfare and social policies as a means to defuse pressures generated by worsening social and economic conditions.Footnote 9 In colonial Korea, too, the state used social work policy to try to engage an increasingly “unruly” society. Under the rhetoric of assimilationist rule, colonial social work was supposed to showcase the “humane” integration of Korea's population while tacitly subduing opposition to Japanese rule.
I will examine how colonial bureaucrats in Seoul designed the aims and methods of social work to meet the goals of the empire, especially within Japan's adherence to assimilationism. I will focus on a paradigm that I call “ruralism,” which in the late 1920s emerged as key to their strategy. By “ruralism,” I refer to a specific analytical lens and mindset guided by agrarian ideologies.Footnote 10 Around this time, bureaucrats’ policy debates increasingly focused on the rural sphere as the primary site of contestation. In the ruralist mindset, officials defined the vast majority of the Korean population as “rural farmers” (J. nōmin, K. nongmin) and viewed most of the Korean social problems as primarily “rural problems.” Ruralism reflected the global rise of agrarianism, and at the same time symbolized the uniqueness of the Japanese Empire, which put an ideological emphasis on anti-urban, anti-capitalist, anti-Western agrarian values. Although Korea is often characterized as having been a more industrialized colony than was Taiwan, the symbolic value of the rural sphere only increased over time. In 1932, ruralist politics culminated in massive rural revitalization campaigns launched almost simultaneously in the Japanese and Korean countrysides.
For colonial bureaucrats, the strength of the ruralist paradigm came from its discursive instability. It stood upon the agrarian values coming from the metropole, and it was also, crucially, attuned to the agrarian ideologies popular among Korean anticolonial nationalists, leftist activists, and religious leaders, who viewed the Korean countryside as preserving ethnic purity. Ruralism also made it possible to reimagine the imperial domains as divided by rural and urban distinctions rather than ethnic nations. This served the premise of ethnic “sameness” and placed Japan and Korea, both fundamentally agrarian societies, in a continuous space between rural and urban. Within the agrarian value system, the “primitiveness” represented by Korea evoked nostalgia among even Japanese observers.Footnote 11 Simultaneously, the contemporary intellectual discourses that both idolized and detested the rural way of life allowed them to both hide and maintain the colonized status of the Korean masses behind the image of primitive peasants. In short, by categorizing Korean society primarily as “the countryside,” officials could depict Korea as both similar and dissimilar to the metropole.
But the ruralist lens did not function as a magical mirror reflecting whatever picture was convenient to those who used it, and it forced bureaucrats to take specific policy directions. One major effect of ruralism was that it replaced an ethnic characterization of the Korean people as being inherently lazy. This widespread prejudice had prohibited social work bureaucrats from adopting “mass leisure,” particularly the use of films, as a means to educate and transform the minds of large populations. In the late 1920s, the ruralist paradigm pushed aside anxiety over Korean indolence and created a consensus to promote mass leisure, formerly seen as a dangerous tool that would exacerbate their laziness, as one measure to revive rural societies. A screenplay competition was organized to spread mass leisure, and the storylines the social work bureaucrats selected reveal the ruralist paradigm in action.
The politics of colonial difference under the conviction of assimilationism is in many ways analogous to the dynamic seen in post-World War II Africa. The end of World War I had already triggered a new era of international oversight of colonial policies, and the widespread social unrest brought on by the global depression made obvious the immediate need to provide social security to colonized populations.Footnote 12 However, in the British and French empires colonial social work did not gain momentum until World War II, when welfare finally became “a favored means of expressing a new imperial commitment” to colonized populations.Footnote 13 This shift also signaled the start of “developmental colonialism,” in which modernization became the imperative of colonial rule. To operate according to the new paradigm, European officials adopted a new way of conceptualizing the colonial masses. As Frederick Cooper's seminal work has argued, they imposed the category of the universal “wage worker,” a concept of social engineering familiar in European societies, to analyze and manage colonized populations. This conceptual proletarianization, in turn, altered the politics of difference because it required that officials “give up their beliefs about the uniqueness of Africa on which a sense of ‘dominance’ depended.”Footnote 14 The ruralist paradigm developed in Korea two decades before already provided a similar sort of colonial strategy. However, ruralism, as an analytical lens and ideological goal, more effectively accommodated the contradictions between colonial differentiation and assimilation.
SOCIAL WORK AND ASSIMILATIONISM IN COLONIAL KOREA
Social welfare was one of the fields that transcended the boundary between the metropole and the colony in that it forced state officials to define their specific “civilizing” and “modernizing” role vis-à-vis the people. In other words, designing social services tested colonial officials’ assumptions about colonial society and the boundaries of inclusion. It was in the field of social welfare that European colonizers’ principles of racial hierarchy and their reluctance to respond to the economic degradation of local communities were most blatantly revealed. The geographical spread of European colonies produced variation in social policies, but in most territories before World War II issues of social welfare were left to “traditional” indigenous societies and a handful of private and religious institutions.Footnote 15
At first the Japanese Empire was no exception and kept a low profile in providing social services. Like their European counterparts, most Japanese advocates of imperial expansion, and colonial officials, embraced the goal of bringing modernization and enlightenment to newly acquired territories.Footnote 16 Yet, like Europeans, Japanese colonizers kept colonial social policies small in scale and ad hoc; they regarded them as strategic tools to advertise the Japanese emperor's benevolence.Footnote 17 In the 1910s, for example, the Government-General in Korea (GGK) conducted small projects to alleviate poverty and provide food, shelter, and education, while at the same time it violently suppressed resistance.Footnote 18 From a different angle, the engagement (and the lack thereof) during this period indicates that colonial policies here were linked closely to the domestic situation of the metropole and reflected the fiscal austerity in the post Russo-Japanese War economy.Footnote 19 Most importantly, the early projects defined the colonial government as a main architect of social services, although Japanese and foreign (mostly American) religious groups also ran their own orphanages and poverty-relief projects.Footnote 20
The critical divergence from other colonial social welfare approaches came after the March First Independence Movement of 1919, which triggered a switch from military rule to the “cultural rule.” While in the conventionally “assimilationist” French Empire many missionaries and colonial reformers had to follow the discursive rise of associationism and an increased reliance on “traditional tribal” systems, the Japanese highlighted a need to provide social welfare policy, corresponding to the assimilationist principle.Footnote 21 Historian Ōtomo Masako argues that in the late 1910s social welfare projects in Japan started pursuing a new objective of maintaining social order and national unity. Indeed, after World War I social welfare rose as a political field in many industrial societies. In a move characteristic of the Japanese Empire, the same principle was quickly applied to the colonies, though with lower levels of investment. Introducing Japanese-style public facilities such as employment agencies, loan offices, and public baths to the colonies was for authorities a way to differentiate Japanese rule from that of other colonizers, and to tangibly display the government's modernizing and civilizing role to the Korean populations.Footnote 22
As social reformers, social work bureaucrats in colonial Korea, both Japanese and Koreans, shared with their peers in Japan a chauvinistic attitude toward the “ignorant masses” and a missionary zeal for transforming them. Maintaining continuity with the bureaucracy of the metropole, colonial officials analyzed Korean society, diagnosed its “social illnesses,” compared them with those in Japan, and prescribed what they believed were effective treatments.Footnote 23 In the 1920s, with a renewed sense that they were pursuing a civilizing mission, social work specialists and bureaucrats decided to share their knowledge in a new forum. In 1921, the Social Bureau of the GGK established the Korean Social Work Research Group (Chōsen shakai jigyō kenkyūkai) in the Korean headquarters of the Japanese Red Cross. The group's official goal was to study issues related to social work in Korea, publicize projects, and contribute to the “increase of the people's happiness” by expanding social work.Footnote 24 Initially, its activities were limited to the creation and circulation of knowledge through meetings and seminars, but they soon began disseminating their expertise through other events and a monthly journal, Korean Social Work (Chōsen shakai jigyō), published from 1923 until 1944.Footnote 25
By the late 1920s, social work experts and bureaucrats planned to expand their institutions to increase the scale of programs. They identified many social problems in Korea. For example, roughly 13 percent of households lived in dire poverty, more than ten thousand people lived as beggars, and frequent natural disasters exacerbated rural lives, expanded urban slums, and raised the crime rate. Tenancy disputes rose from fifteen in 1920 to 667 in 1931. As late as 1930, less than 20 percent of school-age children attended school. Persistent unemployment in the cities drove highly educated elites to leftist activism.Footnote 26 Yet despite recognition of these and other problems, social work programs remained sporadic and unsystematic. In Korean Social Work many authors argued that the absence of a nation-wide (i.e., peninsula-wide) organization was hindering the development of social work. The July 1928 issue, for instance, published a list of opinions from high-ranking bureaucrats in various departments, journalists, local politicians, lawyers, and business leaders, many of whom complained that there was no centralized system of communication. One lamented, “Social work in Korea is incoherent and disorganized—no communication, no control.”Footnote 27
To these officials, pressed for institutional expansion, the metropole offered a default model of a centralized line of command.Footnote 28 Adopting the common structure of semi-governmental organizations in Japan, the GGK in 1929 expanded the group of experts and established the Association of Korean Social Work (Chōsen shakai jigyō kyōkai). It also created two new positions—president and vice president—which were held by the vice-governor-general of Korea and the director of the Home Department respectively.Footnote 29 The Research Group had already included many bureaucrats,Footnote 30 but the new association merged its top decision-making body with GGK bureaucracy. It also established a local branch in each province and became a peninsula-wide organization under the centralized leadership of the GGK's vice-governor-general.Footnote 31 However, it was not until 1932, when the large-scale rural revitalization campaign was launched, that social work bureaucrats extended any significant influence into the remote countryside.
During this period of institutional expansion and centralization, officials continuously advocated that their primary goal should be the transformation of populations through “moral suasion” (kyōka). Originally a Confucian and Buddhist term (often translated as “civilizing mission” in the context of Chinese history), kyōka referred to the ideological education of emperor-centered nationalism, the spirit of hard work, frugality, and modern living customs, or, in other words, teachings to create diligent and loyal imperial subjects.Footnote 32 Kyōka employed measures such as school instruction, publications, public speeches, award ceremonies for model villagers, youth and women's gatherings, night study groups, volunteer labor projects, and slogans hung in public facilities. Kyōka campaigns by the Home Ministry and semi-governmental groups permeated Japanese society from the turn of the century until the end of World War II. Moral suasion became “a fixture in Japanese governance during the twentieth century,” historian Sheldon Garon argues.Footnote 33 Moral suasion in the field of social work emphasized “self-reliance” as a way to alleviate poverty. As a part of these projects, social work experts instructed the lower-class populations to promote the efficient use of family labor and well-planned spending.Footnote 34 Young people in particular, both urban and rural, were targeted for instruction.
In colonial Korea, the emphasis on moral suasion was similarly strong, if not stronger, and the term was inflated to denote any policies and programs that promoted modernizing reforms of daily customs and submission to Japanese imperial dominance. Moral suasion was among the most popular topics in Korean Social Work and discussed in almost every issue. Colonial officials used moral suasion programs to confront various ideological oppositions to Japanese imperialism. In the GGK's annual report on governance in the journal's 1931/1932 joint issue, colonial officials expressed worry about “ordinary masses and youth who have a tendency to be readily stirred up by nationalist and socialist movements.”Footnote 35 The devastating effects of the Great Depression only heightened these concerns. In 1932, the GGK increased the budget to strengthen moral suasion campaigns, and more actively organized projects including youth and women's training groups, public lectures, local improvement campaigns, and pamphlet publications.Footnote 36
THE MINDSETS OF SOCIAL WORK BUREAUCRATS: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION IN 1930
The methodological challenge in studying the thoughts of mid-level bureaucrats is that, unlike the governors-general or prominent intellectuals, they rarely explained their ideological principles explicitly. They wrote many articles in their journals, but often limiting their topics to administrative news, procedures, statistics, and at best policy analyses, leaving abstract theories that would link their conduct with the legitimacy of Japanese rule to higher-ups or guest writers. That does not mean they had no political-ideological preferences in establishing their relationship with colonial society. For one thing, their manner of writing itself was a manifestation of their self-designated role as primarily issue-based professionals rather than colonialists, sharing concerns and analytical skills with the middle-class activists and influential bureaucrats in the metropole. But historians have to discern their unwritten codes of conduct from their manners of analyses and policy-making, rather than expecting to find them in their own phrases.
For the purpose of detecting the ideological assumptions of social work bureaucrats, one exceptionally helpful document is the transcription (most likely heavily edited) of a roundtable discussion held on 15 September 1930, published in the October–November 1930 issue of Korean Social Work. It presents some direct voices of seven social work bureaucrats,Footnote 37 all members of the Association of Korean Social Work: Kamiuchi Hikosaku (the chief of the Social Bureau), Ǒm Ch'ang-sǒp (administrator of the Home Department), Okuyama Senzō, Watanabe Tetsuo, Yi Kak-chong, and Satō Yoshiya (commissioned officers), and Kikuchi Taketomo (a secretary to the association and editor of the journal).Footnote 38 Two of these men, Ǒm and Yi, were Korean officials who had pursued and would continue their careers as GGK officials, and the others were Japanese who had settled in Korea between 1913 and 1920. Two topics were on the agenda: the direction in which Korean social work should develop, and the guiding principle of social moral suasion. But the printed article reflects the discussion's loose structure and the fluid, repetitive, and often incoherent nature of what people said. The format of a roundtable discussion, unlike an essay, revealed their inconsistent attitudes toward colonial social work and allowed their diverse concerns and goals to come out.
Their embrace of assimilationism as a guiding principle is clear in the piece in their unstated but shared efforts to transplant the Japanese ways of social work into colonial society. The most telling sign of their internalization of assimilationist logic is what was not discussed, or at least not printed in the article. They avoided all mention of colonialism, and phrases that would accentuate Japan's position as a colonizer, such as “colonial,” “colony,” or even “assimilation.” Instead, they used terms familiar to the realm of Japanese social work, such as “moral suasion,” “social education,” and “social illnesses.” Using these terms helped them appear detached from the political reality of ethnic dominance and subjugation and emphasized their professional expertise. Toward the end of the discussion Kamiuchi finally brought up a phrase “the annexation of Korea” to argue that social work experts should not be concerned with such political technicalities.Footnote 39 The participants presented social work programs much as the Japanese home government and the GGK did—Korea's problems were matters of adjustment rather than of difference in kind.
Despite the avoidance of the word “colonial,” the goal of transforming Korean populations was, as implied by the assimilative civilizing mission of any empire, imperial in nature and grounded in an assumption of ethnic hierarchy. Yi and Kamiuchi emphasized the primitive nature of the Korean population. Kamiuchi remarked, “Although this is a rough way to put it, even if a thousand or two people die, Korea won't [collapse], but it is helpless if the minds of young people, who shoulder the future of Korea, are not yet formed [through moral suasion].”Footnote 40 These social work bureaucrats’ embrace of the colonizer's mentality so evident in these passing remarks, and common in Korean Social Work articles, makes their reticence about Korea's status as colonized stand out all the more. The assimilationist rhetoric that valued the “sameness” of two ethnic worlds and the nature of the expertise-driven field of social work produced an uncomfortable façade.
At the same time, the roundtable revealed their multifaceted worldviews, which cannot be captured by the simple dichotomies of colonizer and colonized or civilized and primitive. One element that added complexity was the cohesive group consciousness colonial bureaucrats shared, which, at least in their writings, transcended ethnic boundaries. Throughout the journal, the differences between Korean and Japanese officials’ social backgrounds and positions were nowhere to be found. Given the extremely limited venues of social mobility for Korean elites, it is unlikely the roundtable participants all shared the same personal and social pressures, yet they emphasized their communal bond. One way they enhanced their common identity was by expressing shared frustrations with the home government in the metropole. All voiced disappointment at the metropole's failure to provide a guiding principle for moral suasion in Korea. This attitude among colonial officials was not limited to the field of social work. The GGK as a whole had developed a tight network of personnel and governing offices throughout the peninsula, and Okamoto Makiko argues that this fostered a collective identity among colonial bureaucrats, including both Korean and Japanese officials. GGK officials often tried to avoid interventions by the home government, and this made the GGK's political and fiscal independence a contentious issue in Japanese domestic politics.Footnote 41 For these officials to present themselves as a group of apolitical experts criticizing the shortcomings of the home government was a political statement in and of itself.Footnote 42
Another element that shaped their mindset was their shared desire to obtain more resources and respect for social work projects, partly due to professional conviction and partly as a way to satisfy their sense of self-importance. The first problem addressed in the roundtable discussion, raised by Yi, was that social work projects were not accompanied by adequate publicity.Footnote 43 These officials were puzzled by how difficult it was to convince the Korean population of the value of social work, and by that population's general lack of enthusiasm. It was in responding to the challenge of proving their worth that the social work bureaucrats realized they needed to analyze social dynamics specific to Korea. It is clear that the lack of support from the population resulted mostly from the fact of colonization, but the bureaucrats ignored that and instead broached a series of rather naive questions: Who constituted Korean society? To which group of people should they give priority; Koreans or Japanese, rural or urban, rich or poor? How should they understand the difference between Japanese and Korean society?
Even a casual attempt to answer these questions would make obvious that Korean society was not going to provide middle-class allies for these officials. As David Ambaras has argued, in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) it was new middle-class professionals in collaboration with government officials who identified social problems and demonstrated their “solutions” to the population. The “new, urbanized, middle class of white-collar workers” exercised irreplaceable power to formulate social values by offering expert “social knowledge.”Footnote 44 They intervened in all aspects of daily life—work habits, hygiene, consumption patterns, clothing, housing, and education—and imposed their middle-class norms on both the upper and lower classes.Footnote 45 These reformers actively cooperated with government officials and they often took up official positions. In the colonial setting, however, the dynamics that had produced the Japanese new middle class were absent, such as the Tokyo-centered education system, the abolition of the traditional upper class, the rapid increase in urban professions, and the wide acceptance of Western knowledge.Footnote 46 Although a number of Korean students went to foreign colleges, and Keijō Imperial University was established in Seoul in 1924, the size of such upper-class elites remained too small to form a “new middle class,” even though some of them became cultural leaders who supported assimilationism.Footnote 47 The roundtable participants, trying to emulate the dynamic in the metropole, emphasized the leadership of “ordinary people.” Satō argued, “If bureaucrats were dragged forward by the initiatives of the people, that would be an indication of our success [in publicizing social work].” Kikuchi agreed, noting that “in Japan, that often happens.”Footnote 48 These officials criticized the sectors that they expected to play a bigger role. For example, they voiced disappointment in traditional landholding literati in rural areas (yangban) and Japanese settlers in provincial towns. Yi expressed his frustration that both groups demanded honorary recognition or rewards for their donations to social work projects, instead of considering them necessary for society's collective survival.Footnote 49
The issue of political legitimacy and the unpopularity of Japanese rule added another obstacle. The Japanese attempted to broaden the pro-Japanese social base during the 1910s and 1920s. They did find some possibilities of collaboration, starting with the Ilchinhoe (Advancement Society), a populist organization that collaborated closely with Japanese right-wingers from its establishment in 1904,Footnote 50 and the Taishō Shinbokukai, a fraternal association of colonial officials and Korean elites active from 1916. But most such efforts failed.Footnote 51 There were other organizations willing to promote social welfare programs. The Association of Korean Social Work had initially collaborated with Japanese and foreign religious groups active in Korea, and invited Buddhist and Christian leaders of various sects to be core members along with social work professionals. Korean Social Work often published articles that reported on the religious groups’ activities and even advertised their religious philosophies. Some of the Japanese business communities in Korea also provided funding for social work projects.Footnote 52 But these groups did not constitute a wide base in Korean society, nor did they all share the same social values, educational and economic backgrounds, or goals. In the end, the colonizer's anxiety about anti-colonial movements blocked any real synthesis of state officials and private social reformers. Discussion of the issue of a support base led the roundtable participants to the natural conclusion that the role of social work bureaucrats had to be enhanced and they had to act as “the new middle class” that could bridge the state and society.
In the meantime, these officials shared with their counterparts in Japan an acute sense of crisis. State officials in both Japan and Korea faced increasing social complexity over the course of the 1920s. The social sphere expanded and challenged imperial bureaucracy, particularly in the form of contentious politics: political party rivalries, tenancy and labor disputes, and growing anti-imperial, socialist, and communist activism. The new “cultural rule” in Korea allowed the circulation of Korean-language newspapers, Tonga ilbo and Chosǒn ilbo, and expanded the sphere of communication among educated Koreans in provincial towns. These newspapers encouraged readers to form local youth groups to promote nationalist campaigns. Around this time anti-colonial communist activists also expanded their networks and some of their groups joined the Communist International. By the mid-1920s, a number of communist and nationalist organizations had been established in every county capital, and they were competing with each other.Footnote 53 While a vibrant public sphere emerged, the cultural and economic gaps between the urban and the rural widened throughout the empire. In both Japan and Korea, increasing migration from the stagnant agricultural sector to urban cities became a phenomenon called “city-going fever.” Although financial difficulties had for decades been forcing peasants to relocate, not until the 1920s did the lure of urban cosmopolitan culture become so intense, especially for young people. These phenomena heightened state officials’ fears about the spread of anti-establishment attitudes across urban and rural spheres.
Facing these new social tensions, Japanese officials sought to conceptualize and understand “society.” Norisugi Yoshihisa, a prominent bureaucrat in Japan's Home Ministry, for example, defined society as “an organic group consisting of people who share a collective purpose.” Norisugi further developed the previous emphasis on moral suasion into a more systematic “social education.” Compared to moral suasion, a concept that assumed the supreme importance of the imperial state over individuals, the idea of “social education” aimed to help individuals acquire qualities that would make them good members of society, including the spirit of social cooperation, public service, and self-reliance.Footnote 54 After World War I, Norisugi saw Japan “standing at the fork between the path to a first-rate state and a retreating path toward a third-rate state,”Footnote 55 and that a strong society was a prerequisite for becoming a first-rate global power. To remedy the underdevelopment of “society,” officials like Norisugi furthered emphasized the “improvement of daily life,” “mass leisure,” and “physical exercise.”Footnote 56
This desire these officials had to shape “society” to meet the goals of the national-imperial state, already powerfully reflected in earlier moral suasion campaigns, burgeoned during the period of contentious politics. In Korea, the need to counter unruly “society” was felt even more urgently because institutions of moral suasion and social work had reached neither the urban nor the rural populations. Social work officials saw starving peasants flooding into large cities—including a growing number of itinerant beggars in Seoul—but they lacked any measures to mitigate the problem.Footnote 57 The roundtable discussants expressed the resulting pressure they felt and their sense of urgency through the analogy of an organic body: Korean society was “gravely sick” and “plagued with multiple illnesses,”Footnote 58 and social work officials, like medical professionals, were responsible for diagnosing the illnesses and devising appropriate treatments as quickly as possible.
The roundtable made clear that they pursued a combination of several goals, including to adhere to the assimilationist principle, adjust to Korea-specific social conditions, give more publicity to social work, contain social problems, and maintain colonial officials’ cohesive identity vis-à-vis the metropole. Behind their aspirations their exasperation was palpable. Their goals were often contradictory: striving to apply the Japanese style of social work while challenging its authority; wanting to play a bigger role but securing no institutional resources; aspiring to work strictly as professionals with expert knowledge while being colonizers who lacked popular support. Their frustration led them to take one particular direction: ruralism.
“RURALZING” KOREAN SOCIETY
I argue that these social work bureaucrats, adrift on a sea of frustration, in the late 1920s adopted a new paradigm to guide their policy-making—they resorted to applying the lens of “ruralism” to conceptualize the Korean masses. By emphasizing that Korea was a predominantly rural society compared to Japan, they perceived the “social illnesses” of Korean society as those problems that typified rural farmers and farming villages: illiteracy, poverty, superstitions, anachronistic customs, and a dearth of educational and cultural facilities, social opportunities, and leisure. Colonial bureaucrats made no declaration that they would employ the ruralist analytical lens, but there is ample circumstantial evidence that they did so. For example, in 1928 Yi Kak-chong analyzed “Korean rural problems” in the journal Korean Local Administration (Chōsen chihō gyōsei), and elaborated on farmers’ financial hardships and their city-going fever. He even called for “the establishment of the Way of the Farmer” (J. nōmindō, K. nongmindo) to overcome rural problems.Footnote 59 In the 1930 roundtable discussion, as well, the participants discussed rural-centered social work as the “Korean way” as opposed to urban-focused Japanese social work.
Characterizing Korea as primarily a “rural society” reassured colonial officials that they could handle its governance and cope with the large and unreachable masses. “Rural problems” had been a familiar topic in Japan since the deflation of the 1880s, which impoverished rural populations and rapidly expanded the rate of tenancy.Footnote 60 Moral suasion and agricultural production had been interlinked in governmental campaigns since the Meiji period, as seen in the famous Local Improvement Movement (1906–1918) and its offspring, the Movement to Foster the People's Strength (1919–1931). Over the course of the 1910s and 1920s, state officials had established networks of youth associations and army reservist groups throughout the countryside.Footnote 61 Through these networks, social reformers in Japan raised their profile as experts capable of influencing and disciplining rural populations to increase production, ease tensions between landlords and tenants, and promote diligence as a sign of loyalty to the emperor.
In Korea, by contrast, colonial officials during the 1910s had found few ways to engage with the rural sphere. The need to quickly extend effective rule over the countryside became urgent after the March First Movement, during which, of the thousands of demonstrators arrested, four times more were agricultural workers than urban teachers and students.Footnote 62 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, colonial officials produced a large number of articles analyzing Korean rural problems, in Korean Social Work, Korean Local Administration, and Education in Korea (Bunkyō no Chōsen). Social work experts repeatedly “ruralized” the issues of Korean society by arguing, “that agriculture is the basis of the nation is the principle of rule in Korea as well,” “rural residents in Korea, consisting of 80 percent of the total population, are in an emergency situation,” and “rural development is the policy of primary importance.”Footnote 63 During this same period the GGK endorsed on-site research into and monographs about rural tenancy, production, finances, customs, and reforms, increasingly equating Korea with rural areas.Footnote 64
The colonial government was not alone in casting the image of rural farmers (nongmin) over society at large. Korean nationalists were eagerly adopting and promoting the global trend of agrarian romanticism in the 1920s. Korean agrarianists, like their Japanese counterparts, cultivated an anti-capitalist and anti-urban ideology that imagined the rural villages as the foundation of a new Korea.Footnote 65 Young Hook Kang, a student in the 1930s, later recalled the popular agrarian ideal expressed by nationalist leaders: “In those days, we were fond of reading novels such as Yi Kwang-su's Hŭk, Yi Ki-yŏng's Kohyang, and Sim Hun's Sangnoksu, etc. The major theme of these novels was the enlightenment movement in the countryside. The nationalist leaders in these days appeared to have believed in the possibility of maintaining our national identity and national spirit in the Korean farmers, whose lives had deep roots in Korean soil.”Footnote 66
For socialist and communist activists, who challenged Japan's colonial rule in a most confrontational manner, the rural suffering epitomized the cruelty of imperial-capitalist exploitation.Footnote 67 Religious leaders, too, turned to the rural sphere to provide an alternative modernity to the Korean peasantry. Albert Park has shown that, between 1925 and 1937, the YMCA, Presbyterian leaders, and Ch’ǒndogyo all pursued the reconstruction of rural Korea into “a heavenly kingdom on earth” through community building, and achieved noticeable success.Footnote 68 Although they competed politically, these leaders shared the assumption that the future of the Korean nation rested in the hands of the peasant masses. These intellectuals employed a dichotomy between urban Japan and rural Korea to demarcate the colonizer as “the Other.”
Ruralism was a powerful ideological tool for colonial officials due to its versatility, since it amalgamated the nongmin discourses developed by nationalists, socialists, and religious leaders. Instead of fighting Korean agrarianism, GGK officials incorporated its emphasis on the rural sphere and continued to assert that colonial officials had superb expertise in rural problems.Footnote 69 The effectiveness of their measures, which was especially evident in the 1932 rural revitalization campaign, frustrated the anti-colonial camps. Young Hook Kang continued in his memoir, “As time passed, we had to acknowledge the crude fact that farmers and countryside were not a repository of national spirit and conscience as some national leaders had hoped. As long as their lives were not threatened and the social order was maintained, they seemed rather indifferent to the nature of their leadership. In my observation, the Korean farmers were so amenable that they had no difficulty in adapting themselves to Japanese rule. Thus, I was driven to despair by thoughts of the possibility of losing our national identity forever.”Footnote 70
The GGK and the local administration absorbed not just the activists’ discourses and rural programs, but the activists themselves. Around this time, the GGK cracked down on the nationalist, socialist, and communist groups in provincial towns and integrated the local leaders into the colonial civil service. In addition to reaffirming their dominance over anti-colonial groups, colonial officials now contrasted urban Japan with rural Korea in order to assert their unique position against the home government. In the roundtable discussion, Kikuchi “ruralized” Korea to highlight a contrast with the metropole: “It is inevitable to move toward the countryside if Korea is doing Korea's unique social work, social work that Japan could not imitate.” Kamiuchi went so far as to argue, “Korea is far more advanced than Japan in rural-centered social work.”Footnote 71
In reality, as mentioned earlier, the Japanese government had developed extensive grassroots programs and campaigns to mobilize rural villages, and particularly rural youth, since the Meiji era. Agrarianism in Japan had fully blossomed by the turn of the twentieth century, nurturing various strains of “nōhonshugi” (agrarian nationalism).Footnote 72 One of the most influential agrarianists, Yokoi Tokiyoshi, a professor at Tokyo Agricultural College, had argued the Way of the Farmer as the heir to the Way of Warrior,Footnote 73 an idea Yi Kak-chong adopted in his analysis of Korean rural problems. In the 1920s, all the major political parties in Japan during electoral campaigns advocated the “revitalization of farming villages,” politicizing the anti-urban and anti-capitalist sentiments widespread among rural residents. Unable to differentiate their policy goals, parties created a situation of “competition of enthusiasm” that further propelled the rhetoric of agrarian ideals.Footnote 74 It was this shared token of Japanese agrarianism that allowed Kamiuchi to express a sense of rivalry with the home government. By merging the absolute popularity of agrarianism in Japan with the central importance of the countryside among Korean intellectuals, GGK officials reemphasized the presence of “rural Korea” against “urban Japan,” asserting the GGK's political significance and pioneer status in realizing agrarian ideals in the rural-dominated empire.
At the same time, ruralism allowed them to emphasize the image of the “backward savages” of colonized masses without rendering it in ethnic and racial characterizations. Not unlike the France of Eugen Weber's classic Peasants into Frenchmen, the image of peasants as uneducated and dirty was prevalent in Japan even as agrarian nationalism extolled the purity of the countryside.Footnote 75 For instance, Japanese novelist Mayama Seika, who grew up in the rice-producing Miyagi prefecture, described peasants with blatant disgust in his famous novel Minamikoizumi Village (1907–1909): “There is nothing more miserable than peasants. Small peasants in Ōshū region are particularly bad. They wear rags, eat impure grains, and incessantly produce children. Their lives are muddy, dirty, and lightless like the wall clay. You can compare it to the life of a crawling worm that licks dust to live. Even if their bodies stand up, many of their hearts crawl on the ground.… Just as livestock has the smell of livestock, peasants have a distinct physique. It is easy to tell. Their miserable faces are easy to tell.”Footnote 76
Other intellectuals expressed a wide range of emotions regarding impoverished farmers, ranging from detestation to sympathy. But even proletariat authors could not erase the stereotypes attached to small farmers, and sometimes they unintentionally exacerbated them. As professionals in charge of “transforming” peasants, schoolteachers and local officials in the Japanese countryside often pointed out their problems: “lacking a consciousness of time, ignorant of the sacredness of physical labor, lacking a spirit of cooperation, poor in public morals, finding little value in trust, having wasteful customs, lacking the spirit of self-rule,” and so on.Footnote 77 The social work bureaucrats in Korea identified almost exactly the same characteristics when they analyzed that country's rural problems. When discussed in the context of rural problems, these supposed characteristics allowed officials to simultaneously stereotype the population and blur the distinction between the colonizer and colonized.
In short, ruralism, as an analytical and ideological tool, gave officials a way to both “Other” and “not-Other” the Korean masses. They needed to wave the banner of assimilationism while retaining the power to demarcate boundaries as they felt necessary. Framing the social issues as rural problems made this subtle maneuver possible. The ruralist paradigm, by incorporating the (Korean) nationalist, socialist, religious, and agrarian discourses, also helped colonial officials to assert their unique position separate from the Japanese home government.
Although it is not explicitly mentioned in their essays, their shift to ruralism most likely also reflected the pressures coming from outside the Japanese imperial domains. In the late 1920s, the category of “rural peasants” was receiving increasing attentions from international society. One source of pressure was Christian missionaries. The Jerusalem meeting of the International Missionary Council in 1928 included a workshop dedicated to discussing rural problems across the globe in relation to missionary work. In it, American agricultural scientist Kenyon Butterfield called for attention to rural societies because “the rural people are significantly numerous,” and “the rural village or local community as a social unit is of first-rate significance.”Footnote 78 Edmund de Schweinitz Brunner reported his research on serious economic depression in rural Korea and laid out causes such as illiteracy and political exploitation, although he carefully chose the words he used to criticize Japanese colonial policy.Footnote 79 Coming from missionaries, who had long played a central role in providing education and social welfare services in many colonies, their collective decision to tackle rural devastation signaled an international trend. Indeed, their new focus on rural poverty was supposed to bolster the churches at a time when the legitimacy of missionaries as social service providers was diminishing. In the 1920s, the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization, and other international bodies exerted more direct political pressure on imperial governments to provide interventionist social programs in their colonies.Footnote 80 Achieving “rural betterment” through reviving and supporting community life was a popular theme for both the League officials and professionals in European empires.Footnote 81 In other words, the colonial rural sphere became a new hotspot where the efficacy of Japanese rule in Korea was assessed by external experts.
Such international moves in the 1920s went hand in hand with the rise of global ideologies that constructed a dichotomy between “industrial” and “rural” populations, whether to advocate or oppose capitalism, promote children's health, problematize juvenile delinquency, define national strength, or confront Western imperialism. The link between agrarian romanticism and nationalism, having emerged in the late nineteenth century, was now being reinforced around the globe. In Japan, Britain, France, and many other industrializing societies rural problems and the crisis of national identity were considered inseparable.Footnote 82 By adopting the new symbolic meaning of the “rural” that developed in these imperial and global contexts, colonial officials in Korea drew a line between “us” and “them” in delicate and complex ways.
RURALISM AND LEISURE
The analytical lens of ruralism did not long remain a convenient tool for social work officials. Ruralism not only cloaked their analyses of Korean society in the idioms of assimilationism, but it also pressured them to apply the same concepts used in the Japanese agrarian paradigm to Korean society. It made it difficult for them to maintain some of their most basic ethnic stereotypes of Korean people. This dialectic was revealed in debates over “mass leisure” that took place in the final years of the 1920s.
One program unanimously supported in the 1930 roundtable discussion was to hold a film script competition as a way to increase public awareness of Korean social work. Five months later, Korean Social Work announced the competition and invited entries. The selection committee gave awards to five fictional stories for rural entertainment. These represented a significant departure from previous government-supported films, which had all been highly didactic documentaries. This seemingly trivial attempt to gain publicity would not have happened a few years earlier. Not until the intervention of the ruralist analytic into Korean colonial rule between 1927 and 1930 did “mass leisure,” particularly films, come to be seen as a suitable means to conduct social work.
In the Japanese metropole, state officials had very cautiously examined the use of films in moral suasion (and social education) programs for the domestic population over the course of the 1920s. For Japanese social reform bureaucrats in the 1910s and 1920s, urban consumer culture was an ongoing problem since it appeared to cause a number of social problems, including juvenile delinquency, excessive materialism, and immoral sexual behaviors. Many social work projects were designed to educate the masses in the “right way” of consumption. The rapidly expanding film industry alarmed these officials because it represented the new force of mass leisure. Norisugi Yoshihisa's famous 1923 work A Study of Social Education, quoted above, argued, “It can be said that the reality of the leisure industry in our country today is that it has a more degrading effect than a purifying effect for our life. The improvement and development of this field should by no means be overlooked by educators or intellectuals. I believe that it is extremely reasonable, and in fact quite urgent, to plan programs on the purification and improvement of mass leisure as one of the major institutions for social education.”Footnote 83 He regarded the problem of mass leisure as an issue of national competitiveness: “The improvement of citizens’ tastes has a grave relationship with the improvement of ethics and thoughts of the citizens…. Especially in a place like our country where the state of mass leisure is very immature and vulgar compared to that in the West, we only have forms of leisure in which we aimlessly waste money and time, and because of such attention [characterized by] a careless vapidity, all sorts of temptations run rampant.”Footnote 84 Among popular leisure activities, he argued, films required the greatest caution. He stressed that government agencies needed to regulate harmful films, promote healthy cinema, and raise the population's awareness of the dangers of the influence of films.Footnote 85
Other experts, however, endorsed films as an educational tool. Most famously, sociologist Gonda Yasunosuke warned against hasty conclusions that films led to juvenile delinquency and generally emphasized the importance of mass leisure in human life.Footnote 86 Others discussed the potential of films as a useful means to educate the masses.Footnote 87 One film critic, Tachibana Takahiro, agreed that films had value as a tool for social education, arguing, “The movie has a cachet called ‘leisure’—it envelops bitter medicine, convenient to give to the sick.”Footnote 88 Because of the initiative of these experts and the growing interest in mass leisure, state officials adopted the use of films in social work and moral suasion campaigns in the mid-1920s.Footnote 89
The problem arose when the idea of leisure was introduced into the Korean context. The fear of mass leisure proved to be stronger among officials there because they stereotyped Koreans as inherently lazy, and they assumed the introduction of mass leisure would exacerbate that tendency. One author wrote in Korean Social Work, “I traveled around all the provinces of Korea, but I saw Koreans sitting idly and giving an absent look everywhere I went. On hot summer days, they lie down like dead bodies.”Footnote 90 A number of other members of the Korean Social Work Research Group listed the elimination of laziness and the cultivation of strong work habits among the people as pressing tasks in social work projects.Footnote 91 Ethnic prejudice was widespread beneath the discursive overlay of ethnic “sameness” and reached into the top echelon of politicians who officially promoted the unity of Japan and Korea. In 1927, Ugaki Kazushige, then deputy governor-general, wrote in his diary that in Korea many people preferred non-manual labor, and it was necessary “to instill the spirit of ‘labor is sacred’ through the initiative of the upper classes and the yangban.”Footnote 92
Doubt in the value of leisure in Korea drove colonial officials to re-export their warning message to Japan. Sōda Izō, secretary to the Association for Korean Social Work, who also attended the 1930 roundtable, had written an essay in 1927 that emphasized the virtue of diligence and the fear that mass leisure would harm it. Sōda harshly criticized the “culture of leisure” prevalent in Japan and presented “a theory of leisure destroying the nation.” He argued: “The progress of citizens and the prosperity of the nation depend solely on diligence. The current trend in which leisure is put first and in front of diligence will destroy Japan. My beloved Japan is now at the crossroad between survival and destruction.”Footnote 93
Nonetheless, during the last few years of the 1920s, the embrace of ruralism by colonial officials swamped the ethnic characterization in their rhetoric and by the 1930 roundtable these officials, including Sōda, had reached the consensus that leisure was not only useful but essential for rescuing the rural masses. The March 1931 issue of Korean Social Work, which specialized in rural social work and consolidated the ruralist analytic among social work bureaucrats, endorsed leisure as a means to restore liveliness in rural areas. Ueno Jingo in the Agricultural Bureau, for example, argued that leisure facilities might narrow the gap between rural and urban lives: “As a measure to increase the efficiency of farmers, comfort them, and prevent them from moving to the cities, I advocate giving leisure facilities to the farmers.”Footnote 94 Others, too, viewed structuring leisure as an alternative form of moral suasion that fostered the spirit of hard work and communal bonding. Their analysis used an alternative expression, “the sinking morale of young farmers,” to address the phenomenon that had previously provoked the image of “lazy Koreans.” Once they had switched their analytical approach, “leisure” became a solution rather than a risk.
As a key means of providing and controlling “leisure” for rural audiences, films received great attention. The use of films was not in itself new to the GGK. In 1920, the government had created a “motion-picture team” to create documentary films to advertise the development of Korea to the Japanese and foreign audiences, and to show scenes of Japan to Korean populations.Footnote 95 Documentary films were not yet associated with mass leisure, but were viewed instead as a sophisticated propaganda tool. At the Korean Expo in 1929, the GGK built seventeen screening rooms to show a number of documentaries, and they became the most popular part of the exhibition.Footnote 96 These films, including one about Korean agriculture, were targeted at urban residents, people in Japan, and foreign guests.Footnote 97
After the conceptual “ruralization” of Korea in the late 1920s, the goal of educational films changed. The colonial government advocated the creation of films specifically tailored for Korean villages. Okuyama Senzō, one of the 1930 roundtable participants, discussed the use of films as a means of moral suasion in a series of articles in Korean Social Work between 1931 and 1933. In the opening article he framed “today's urgent task” as “to promote moral suasion in Korean villages that have no educational facilities.” He emphasized the utility of films because “they could be used outdoors and educate illiterate people, do not raise a concern of tiring people like dry textbooks, and promote moral suasion through enjoyment and powerful impressions before they know it.”Footnote 98 He argued that a priority for rural moral suasion was “to produce films with a Korean color” appropriate to Korean villagers.Footnote 99
In this context, it is no surprise that the screenplays that won awards in the 1931 Korean Social Work competition were all fictional dramas set in the countryside.Footnote 100 The Association of Korean Social Work had provided three themes for screenplays in the competition: the moral suasion of youth, the improvement of daily life, and the display of the current state of development in Korea.Footnote 101 The result, even though the call for entries had not mentioned agrarian values or rural problems, demonstrated that ruralism had become the widely accepted paradigm. These stories wove together many elements that promoted diligence, sacrifice, and harmony with Japanese agricultural settlers. For instance, one of them, “Overcoming the Stormy River,” featured a young, hardworking Korean man from a family in dire poverty. In the story he rescues a landed Japanese family from an overflowing river in a storm. Also narrated are the sacrifice of his dying father, his marriage with the daughter of the Japanese family, and restoration of the village through cooperation between the Japanese settlers and diligent Korean youth.Footnote 102 Other stories in the screenplays likewise emphasized the power of young people in restoring rural villages and depicted farming as the most promising career.
The storylines tell us that the selection committee sought a different kind of film from the documentaries the GGK motion-picture team had created; they wanted fictional tales with dramatic climaxes that would entertain rural audiences. A love relationship between a young couple was often the main driver in these plots. The scripts also incorporated characters with “weak” minds who escaped to cities and then returned disillusioned. The stories acknowledged the devastation of rural villages by natural disasters, promised success to the hardworking heroes, and contrasted a morally decadent urban environment with a tough but rewarding rural life. While wealthy Japanese settlers played a peripheral and simplistic role, if any, young Korean men and women were given more complex personalities in addition to their heroic roles. Through dramatic scenes such as rescues during natural disasters and mob violence, they incorporated many elements of mass leisure, matching the influence of the commercial productions of the day.
At the same time, these screenplays revealed the cruelty typical of assimilationist programs. The advocacy for “local color” did not mean a Korean-centered production or Korean-language scripts. Although they were set in Korean villages, the roles of young protagonists corresponded perfectly with the agrarian discourse popular in Japan in this period. Ruralism substituted for “Korean color,” universalizing the hardship of Korean villagers as understood in the Japanese agrarian ideology. In fact, four out of the five scripts were written by Japanese authors, two of whom did not reside in Korea, which led to a direct transplanting of Japanese agrarianism to the Korean settings. Furthermore, the field of Korean social work was, ironically, still dominated by urbanites. The Association of Korean Social Work at the turn of the 1930s remained largely urban-based without the resources needed to reach into most rural areas.Footnote 103 This institutional limit reinforced the divide between “advanced cities” and “backward villages,” which Korean intellectuals already equated with the divide between colonizer and colonized, and the social work bureaucrats so earnestly attempted to challenge. Though they developed a self-image as expertise-driven, agrarianist pioneers of the empire who overcame ethnic differences, their visions, vividly represented in the screenplays, reveal their detachment from the populations of the Korean countryside and their unmistakable sense of chauvinism, coming from the standpoint of the politically dominant.
CONCLUSION
Ruralism served colonial officials of Korea in multiple ways, but it particularly helped them avoid addressing the contradictions between assimilationist principles and clear differentiations between Japanese and Korean populations. Their ruralist language hid many aspects of colonial reality: the absence of collaboration between the state and society in promoting social work like the “new middle class” operated in Japan; the imperial policies that prioritized the metropole and produced many of Korea's “rural problems”; and the failure of officials to understand or improve rural conditions before 1932. To a surprising degree, though, colonial officials did embrace ruralism as more than a mere instrument to the extent that they modified their perceptions of Korean people. The ruralist paradigm offered social work bureaucrats a policy map that withstood their increasing exposure to international politics advocating “moral” and “humane” colonial rule. Their embrace of ruralism did not end when the Japanese Empire entered all-out war against China in 1937. Instead, the ruralist paradigm in colonial Korea continued to provide ideological coherence when the GGK overwhelmed the Korean countryside with measures to increase agricultural production and recruit rural soldiers.
The multiple functions of the ruralist paradigm display both typical and unique aspects of Japan's colonial strategy. The social, imperial, and global contexts that drove them to adopt ruralism were found in most every colonial empire during the interwar years, such as worsening social and economic conditions and the rising importance of social services, the elevated value of the rural sphere, internal politics and rivalry between the colonial government and the metropole, the persistent premise of colonial difference, and the paternalistic attitudes of social reformers.
The parallel with some of the French colonial policies is particularly striking. In 1931, Robert Delavignette, a renowned French colonial official, cast the image of a steadfast “peasantry” over rural Africans in his prize-winning book Les Paysans noirs.Footnote 104 Like the Japanese, French officials sought rural education reforms in the 1920s and 1930s. Japanese and French officials also shared an emphasis on the “local character” in educating rural populations.Footnote 105 What differentiated the Japanese from the French and other European officials was their moral commitment to integrating Korean people into the imperial system and the latter's embrace of a deep distinction between idealized “native tribes” and the European system. In these contrasting discursive contexts, attaching the image of “rural peasants” to colonized populations produced opposite effects. For the Japanese, it promoted the conceptual integration of Koreans while preserving colonial hierarchy, while for the French it enhanced the value of native tribes and helped imagine “true Africans.”Footnote 106
The dynamic created by the strong drive to transform colonial populations in Korea was probably matched only by that of developmental colonialism in post-World War II Africa. Both triggered re-conceptualizations of colonial populations and entailed a direct transfer of many policies from the metropole to the colonies. Both also produced incomplete and incoherent programs that undermined the lives of people on the ground. Ruralism, however, with its conceptual instability between assimilation and differentiation, along with the central importance of agrarian nationalism in Japanese public discourse, gave colonial officials more space to maneuver and even mobilize the colonial populations throughout the 1930s. In retrospect, the ruralist paradigm was not simply a product of Japan's assimilationist principle. It provided a key engine that accelerated “Japanization” of colonial Korea until the end of World War II.
