How Korea was really colonized

For 35 years, the place that I inhabit today was not known as Korea, but rather it was part of Japan. While during the 1392-1910 Joseon Dynasty the capital was known as Hanyang, from 1910 to 1945 during the Japanese colonial period the city was officially known in Japanese as Keijō and in Korean as Gyeongseong. Only following liberation did it formally adopt the previous vernacular term of Seoul. My father-in-law, to this day, speaks Japanese very well. This is not because he was associated with the Japanese empire, but rather those that lived in this land went to school, had to face Tokyo, had to bow, had to assume Japanese names and language while in public, and then go home and speak Korean and dream of the flag and liberation and hope.

In 1936, when Korean athletes competed at the Berlin Olympics, made famous by Jesse Owens for defying Hitler's terrible ideology, they did so with a Japanese flag on their chest. The most famous was Son Kee-chung, who won the marathon and became the first Korean to win an Olympic gold medal. His fellow Korean Nam Seung-yong won bronze in the same race. But neither man stood on the podium as Korean. They competed as representatives of the Japanese Empire, with the Japanese flag beside their names. Son later recalled that he felt ashamed rather than proud when he saw the Japanese flag being raised above him.

Some might not realize it, but for a very long time, Korea as we know it today did not exist. It could not be found on a map. Just consider that, for example, when you pick up a map and you look for Persia, the Ottoman Empire, or Manchuria, you do not find them. Of course, you know these names and you find them in history books, but in the modern globe as we know it today, they are gone. They are national empires that have disappeared. And that should remind you that although we consider them to be these permanent, forever entities, they are far from it. Rather, they are constructs; social constructs that rise and fall, just as the deeds of men.

So yes, Korea was colonized, and yes, this colonization was done by the Japanese. But it was done in accordance with the rules of the time, and according to the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement, where the United States acknowledged Japan's sphere of influence over Korea in exchange for Japan recognizing U.S. control over the Philippines. Sovereignty was thus something the great powers could negotiate over the heads of the people who actually lived in the territories concerned.

But that colonization is not the colonization that I want to talk about today. That colonization, with the flags, the names, the treaties, that was just the beginning. It was the scaffolding. The real structure was built inside. And the worst part? We built it ourselves. Because the important thing about colonialism, however, is that it does not always end when the colonial government leaves. Institutions can disappear while habits of thought remain. A political empire can collapse while its categories survive.

I want to talk about a colonization that's more ideological and that still has huge effects on the country today. One of the biggest examples of colonization is not in the usage of hairstyles or physical objects, but in the way it can make a nation rethink, rewrite and reshape its entire history.

So, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Western powers came to the East, Korea decided to try to see itself as equal to them and posit that it also had the capability of achieving enlightenment for its own history, not necessarily through Western history. But in doing this, they began to look through their own accomplishments, their own figures, and their own people of the past. And when they did that, they valued their own history insofar as it contributed to the march of progress in global history. They judged their own history according to the standards made by the West, rather than any domestic or indigenous ways. And this is how colonization can make a nation read its own history differently. The real colonizer is the ideology that makes you hate your own stories because they don't fit a spreadsheet.

And the weird thing about it is, it's not actually done by the colonizers; it's done by the colonized. It's a self-colonization. There is a policeman in your head, and that policeman is focused primarily on scientific revolution, on empirical data, on all that makes us march towards rationality. And in doing so, it makes us forget the myth, the stories, the reach into the beyond; the thing that unites people and the things that cannot be put into words. And it's those things that Korea has, in some way, abandoned, because it seeks to be a colonizer of itself, like those who colonized it.

So, when all this was happening in the age of empire, you had a whole slew of different Korean groups trying to achieve different things. Those in Seoul and those in Pyongyang have very different opinions on this. Furthermore, because it is a democracy, those in the South are not unified in their opinion: they are very divided about who the perpetrators are, who the belligerents are, and how and why justice should be sought for the division and colonization of Korea. There is a traditional four-character expression which says: internal disorder, external chaos. And that was the problem here in Korea, or at least, how they describe it. Because basically, whether the approach was nationalist or colonialist, there was always an impulse by Koreans to appraise cultural practices, if not the whole nation and its culture on a grand scale, in terms of their compatibility with the ideals of a civilized nation and capitalist modernity.

What I'm trying to say here is that the measuring stick by which things were gauged was completely changed. And you can only find that which you are measuring for. For example, if you are using a thermometer, you will never find out how loud something is. And by the same token, if you are using a breathalyzer, you are never going to find out how hot or cold something is. The thing that you use to measure will determine the results that you find.

And Korean people, since the turn of the 20th century, have been measuring their own present and, more importantly, their own past by the measuring stick of the scientific revolution, of rationality and modernity that's associated with the left hemisphere of the brain. Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist; they're just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how best to share the spoils. That's what we see in the North and the South. Despite how different they might seem, they are both a reflection of the same thing. And in a way, they're both outrageously Korean, and by the same token, a product of imperialism and not Korean at all.

So, the big question is: how did Koreans measure themselves before the age of imperialism, before their minds were taken over by judging things according to growth, progress, economy, and material conditions? We know the answer to that question; we have the religious, cultural, and philosophical conditions well studied. The real question is: can we ever return to them? Do we ever want to return to them?

Because returning isn't just about nostalgia. It's about saying that GDP, literacy rates, and scientific output are not the only things that make a life meaningful. And for a nation that has clawed its way from poverty to prosperity using exactly those tools, that is a terrifying thought. It feels like a betrayal of everything that brought us here. So the goal is to not undo anything, but simply rethink the measuring stick.

That is how Korea will achieve real liberation from colonization. It's not by shaming some young woman celebrity because her grandfather did something: that's just scapegoating people, and it achieves nothing other than virtue signaling for people. The real colonization is the colonization that happens in your mind, that tells you the only good thing is that which was decided by the Enlightenment.

Korea is colonized because it still thinks the West is the umpire. Until Korea realizes the game doesn't need an umpire, it will always be playing someone else's sport.