The year 2019, the centennial of the March 1st, 1919, witnessed an outpouring of historical scholarship assessing the complex set of events since “the starting point of Korea's modernity in earnest.” Among a flood of conferences and publications that ensued, one group of scholars stood out for its attempts to stand above a nationalist historiography and situate what it calls the “March 1st revolution,” rather than the more widely used “March 1st Movement,” within a regional and global time. Its scholarship was unique in highlighting the sui generis nature of Koreans' historical experiences without falling into the trap of nationalist historiography while at the same time bringing to relief common challenges shared by East Asia and the world during the modern period.

Korea’s modern historiography is characterized by a series of debates, “history wars,” since the colonial period. One of the central questions that has animated the debates is how to define the subject of Korea’s history. Colonial historiography characterized Koreans as a passive nation lacking an agency of its own, against which the first generation nationalist historians wrote to narrate a history of a nation that has staged a perpetual struggle for independence against foreign invasion and domination throughout time. After 1945, conservative nationalist historians continued a nationalist narrative but confined their historical imaginative space to the capitalist order within which the nation was defined. Critical nationalist historians grew in number and influence from the 1980s as they challenged the conservative historiography’s narrow confinement to expand Korea’s historical space. The critical nationalist historiography began to diversity in the 21st century, leading to a multiplicity of historical narratives, including those critical of nationalist historiography. To understand the history of modern Korean historiography is, therefore, to appreciate the formidable challenges posed by modernity and the indefatigable struggles made by the Korean people, including Korean historians.

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.

The articles re-examines the March First Movement of 1919 in light of the “Candlelight Revolution” of 2016-2017 and situates the latter as part of the incremental unfolding of a long revolution that started with the former. To do so, it turns attention to the East Asian configuration in which three nations—Imperial Japan, semi-colonial China, and colonized Korea—were all connected to the world order and interacted with one another while occupying their respective positions in the world hierarchy. The March First can be regarded as a beginning of a national revolution that sought a kaebyŏk ((開闢, a great opening of a new heaven and earth), not only to adapt to modernity but also to overcome it, and the subsequent history is characterized by “incremental unfolding” of the revolution -through April Nineteenth (1960), May Eighteenth (1980), and lately, the Candlelight revolution (2016). These revolutionary transformations have been forwarded by the Korean people who remain inspired by the light of the March First. Their longing for a kaebyŏk that involves more than a mere reform of political institutions/systems connects the years of 1919 and 2019.

In the six decades of division since the Korean War ended in a “cease-fire,” the vestiges of Japanese colonial rule have used various causes such as anti-communism, liberal democracy, regionalism, and Christian values to cement their status as a cornerstone upholding the system of the North-South division. In this context, the task to eradicate the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators must target the “vestiges of Japanese colonial rule” in every aspect, rather than just the “vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators.” Furthermore, the “vestiges of Japanese colonial rule” must be clearly understood and addressed in light of their fundamental role in maintaining the division of North and South Korea. We must carefully observe how the political activities of sovereign citizens will affect the candlelight government's efforts to complete the imminent tasks to seek reform and to eradicate the vestiges of Japanese colonial rule that remain a cornerstone of vested interests based on the North-South division.