By Andrei Lankov
Peoples intermarry. Whenever two groups, howsoever hostile or different, come into contact, sexual liaisons are bound to occur, and intermarriage usually becomes common as well.
The age of imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries was also an age of great racial mixing even though the empire-builders from different countries had quite different attitudes to marrying the locals.
The British usually despised such alliances, Russians and Spaniards did not see any problem with them, with the French being somewhere in between. But what about the Japanese who dominated Korea in the first half of the 20th century?
People who are used to thinking about imperialist Japan as a very racist society might be surprised to learn that the Japanese colonial authorities looked very favorably on mixed marriages.
However, that initial assumption could not be supported by the fact that the actual number of such marriages remained low. Neither Japanese nor Koreans were too keen to intermarry, at least until the very last years of Japanese rule.
Talk about the desirability or otherwise of mixed marriages with Koreans began in the late 19th century when Japanese intellectuals came to be obsessed with the question of race.
Eugenics, a curious teaching which envisioned artificial breeding of better human beings through controlled marriages, flourished in such an environment.
Its adherents believed that marriages with non-Japanese who were also members of the ``yellow race'' would lead to an improvement of Japanese ``racial qualities,'' and Koreans, the closest neighbors of the Japanese, were often mentioned as ideal partners for such a project.
When, in 1919, the Japanese government decided to change its policy towards Korea, the then-Prime Minister Hara Takashi suggested that Saito Makoto, the newly appointed governor general should do his best to promote mixed marriages and mixed settlements of Koreans and Japanese.
The authorities also stressed the importance of the most prominent of such marriages: Prince Yi Un, the son of King Gojong, married Japanese Princess Masako in a very public ceremony on April 28, 1920.
This was the first of several such marriages and perhaps the most successful one: the couple stayed together until old age and seemingly had a happy family life.
Another ``political marriage'' of a similar nature, between Princess Dokhye, King Gojong's daughter, and a Japanese aristocrat, ended in failure and divorce. Nonetheless, back in the 1920s both unions were much celebrated and lauded as an example to follow.
In the early 1920s the authorities also passed a number of laws and regulations defining the legal standing of children born in such marriages. However, the number of mixed marriages remained small.
For example, in 1925 merely 404 mixed couples tied the knot. Ten years later, in 1935, the figure had increased to 1,038. Until the late 1930s, marriages between Japanese males and Korean females slightly outnumbered those between Korean males and Japanese females (this was to change dramatically around 1937).
However, a few hundred couples a year was not a particularly large number, since by the mid-1930s nearly half a million Japanese lived alongside Koreans in the colony.
The late 1930s brought numerous changes. First of all, from around 1937 the Japanese authorities changed their strategy and began to aggressively promote the assimilation of Koreans.
The Koreans were encouraged and in some cases required to take Japanese-style names, Korean language teaching was banned, and the Korean-language press nearly disappeared. This was known as the ``naeseon ilche'' (Korea and Japan are one) policy.
Indeed, from around 1940 there was a pronounced increase in the number of mixed marriages. In 1942, the last year of colonial rule for which complete statistical data survives, there were over 1,500 such marriages and anecdotal evidence seem to suggest that their numbers kept growing in the subsequent two and a half years.
However, this increase was only partially the result of the efforts of the colonial administration. A large number of these marriages took place in Japan and were a consequence of the mass labor migration from Korea, which began in the late 1930s.
Thousands of Korean males moved there, looking for jobs. In some cases, they were forced to do so, but the vast majority went voluntarily, simply because jobs in Japan paid much more. In the late 1920s, there were merely 150,000 Koreans in Japan.
By 1940, their number had climbed to half a million and it kept increasing quickly, exceeding two million in 1945. These migrants were overwhelmingly male and young, so marriages with Japanese women were bound to happen.
There was an increase in the numbers of such marriages inside Korea as well. A peculiar feature was a dramatic growth in number of mixed couples where the husband was Korean and wife was Japanese. By 1942 such unions greatly outnumbered the unions between Japanese males and Korean females.
What happened to these unions after 1945? The fates of the mixed couples were quite different. Often Japanese wives took Korean citizenship and still live here, now at a very advanced age, not so different from some fellow halmeonis (old women).
In many cases, Korean wives divorced their husbands who left for Japan. In some instances though, they followed them there, often to blend into Japanese society completely.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He has recently published ``The Dawn of Modern Korea,'' which is now on sale at Kyobo Book Center and other major bookstores. The book is based on columns published in The Korea Times. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.