By Andrei Lankov
The Japanese colonial policy in Korea was by no means uniform and it underwent two major changes ― one in 1919-1920 and another in the late 1930s. The second change can be best described as a switch from a policy of apartheid to a policy of assimilation and ethnocide ― and this is why the last decade of the colonial rule is remembered with such bitterness.
The new colonial policy was often seen as being the brainchild of Minami Jiro who served as the governor general from 1936 to 1942, but the change of strategy reflected a major transformation that the Japanese Empire underwent in the 1930s.
There was an important ― if often overlooked ― difference between imperial Japan and such grand Western imperialist enterprises as the British or French empires. The British knew that they could not remake, say, Indians into the English.
The Indians were far more numerous, had different looks, dramatically different culture and lived far away. On the contrary, in the 1930s when a tidal wave of nationalism struck Japan, many Japanese statesmen and intellectual leaders came to the idea that Koreans (as well as Taiwanese) could and should be redeemed into the Japanese.
Indeed, if one compares the position of Korea vis-a-vis Japan to the position of India vis-a-vis the United Kingdom, the difference becomes clear. India’s population was many times that of the U.K. ― whereas the Korean population was roughly half that of Japan. India was located thousands of miles away, while Korea was divided from Japan by a narrow channel. Indians looked different from the British, while only dress and manners might distinguish a Korean from a Japanese person.
Last but not least, unlike the culturally very much different U.K. and India, Korea and Japan share a similar cultural heritage (both were a part of the Sino-centric Confucian civilization) as well as basic religious believes (a mixture of Confucianism, Buddhism and local cults). This is what encouraged the Japanese nationalists to believe that assimilation would be possible. In the late 1930s the earlier apartheid-style policy was discarded, and the drive to forcefully assimilate the Koreans began.
In the colonialist parlance of the era this policy had a special name. This name consisted of the four Chinese characters and can be translated as “[making] Japan and Korea [into] one body” (內鮮一體). In Korean these characters are pronounced as “naeseon ilche,” while their Japanese pronunciation is “naisen ittai.”
Since the late 1930s the new policy was implemented in many areas. Tuition in the Korean language was discontinued, and the use of Korean was much restricted. Korean-language newspapers were closed (with the sole exception of a government-owned daily) while Koreans were demanded to master the “National Language” (국어) which meant, of course, Japanese. The cult of the emperor reached unprecedented heights.
It was a dramatic change of policy. For example, it is relatively well known that in 1940 Koreans were forced to accept the Japanese names. It is far less known that in earlier era they were explicitly forbidden to do so!
Indeed, since 1911 the colonial authorities explicitly banned ethnic Koreans from using the “Japanese-sounding names.” The administrators wanted Koreans to be easily distinguishable from Japanese in official papers. Such a distinction would greatly facilitate surveillance and control.
Since the late 1930s Koreans were persuaded that their country is merely one of many regions of the Japanese empire. So, they were told, it would be only logical if they discard their “dialect” much like, say, it had been done by the inhabitants of Okinawa or Kansai areas in Japan who also spoke a vernacular very different from standard Tokyo-style Japanese.
In Japanese intellectual and political circles this drive for assimilation met with some resistance. It is notable that this resistance came from two sides. On the one hand, there were Japanese intellectuals (and even some politicians) who were not intoxicated with the fashionable racism of the era and did not approve of ethnocide.
On the other hand, the assimilation policy was not necessarily welcomed by the Japanese extreme right. Being deeply racist, they did not want the “pure Japanese stock” being mixed with “inferior” Koreans or Taiwanese. A proper distance from lesser breeds, they believed, should be kept; otherwise the pure Yamato race might disappear.
In a typical statement, found in a 1943 document, the Japanese ultra-nationalists said: “Under the pretext of the ‘policy of assimilation,’ the unity of Yamato race is being damaged, and its culture standards are driven down to their level [level of Koreans, Chinese, etc.].”
However, die-hard racists remained a minority: from the late 1930s the colonial administration was dominated by those whose dream was the complete assimilation of Koreans. It was not genocide as many Koreans insist: the colonizers did not want to slaughter all Koreans. Rather, it was ethnocide: the colonizers systematically destroyed their national identity.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.