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46 chapter 2 Conflict, Introversion, and a Tradition of Korean Revivalists, 1920–1953 The renunciation of individual activity in social matters, and submission to the world domination of the Empire, drove the individual into his own inner life, and forced him to concentrate his energies on the effort to elevate private and personal morality; meanwhile both individuals, and groups composed of individuals on a voluntary basis, found comfort in religious exaltation as a compensation for the hopelessness of the temporal outlook. . . . In reality, however, all impartial religious research reveals the fact that, to some extent at least, religious thought is independent; it has its own inner dialectic and its own power of development; it is therefore precisely during these periods of a total bankruptcy of human hope and effort that it is able to step in and fill the vacant space with its own ideas and its own sentiment. —Ernst Troeltsch Though the March First Movement failed to bring national independence to Koreans, it did bring an end to the so-called Dark Period of the Japanese rule in Korea.1 For evangelicalism and Korean people in general, however, this did not mean that the remainder of the Japanese rule would change for the better. Indeed, perhaps except for Saitō Makoto’s governorgeneralship from 1920 to 1925, known as Cultural Rule, the remainder of the Japanese rule in Korea was, if anything, harsher. The introduction of a new land tenure system that caused hundreds of thousands of Korean farmers to lose their livelihoods, compelling them to drift in search of jobs; large-scale exportation of Korean rice to Japan, causing serious rice shortages in Korea itself; the domination and exploitation of Korean commerce and industry by Conflict, Introversion, and a Tradition of Korean Revivalists, 1920–1953 | 47 Japanese entrepreneurs; the prohibition against using the Korean language in schools and official transactions; forcing all Koreans to pay obeisance to the Shintō shrine; shutting down all Korean newspapers except for that of the governor-general; conscripting Korean men to work as laborers and soldiers; dragooning young Korean women into the sexual slavery called the comfort corps; compelling Koreans to abandon their ancestral names and adopt Japanese ones—such circumstances meant that Japanese rule in Korea from 1920 to 1945 hardly afforded light or joy to Koreans.2 When Korea was finally liberated from Japanese rule on August 15, 1945, all Koreans, except those who had intimately collaborated with the colonizers, looked forward to their future with great expectations.3 But their expectations were cruelly dashed. Five years later, instead of becoming the site of renewal and reconstruction, the Korean peninsula became the site of the horrific destruction known as the Korean War. When North Korean tanks blitzed through the thirty-eighth parallel on June 25, 1950, South Korea, as well as most of the world, was unprepared for an all-out civil war in the peninsula. In hindsight, however, such an event seems all but predictable. Intense disagreements about how Korea was to be reordered had been simmering among Koreans since the end of the March First Movement and boiled over soon after liberation. Indeed, as Bruce Cumings observes, “the emergence of nationalist and communist groups dates back to the 1920s; it is really in this period that the left-right splits of postwar Korea began.”4 On the one hand, a great many Koreans (called leftists, chwaikp’a), especially of the underprivileged class (in the South as well as in the North), wanted to change Korea along a socialist or communist model. They called for measures to drastically overhaul the nation’s social and economic structures and to purge the elements that had collaborated closely with the Japanese. On the other hand, a great many others (rightists, uikp’a), especially the propertied class, sought to change the nation gradually, seeking ultimately to achieve some kind of representative government. At first, efforts were made to compromise the demands of these two main ideological blocs. This compromise was best reflected in the formation of the Korean People’s Republic (KPR), Chosŏn inmin konghwa’guk, whose aim was to keep the sovereignty of the country in Korean hands. The KPR had evolved from an antecedent organization called the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence (Chosŏn kŏn’guk chunbi wiwŏnhoe), a nationwide grassroots organization. The KPR was purely Korean, established soon after the Japanese surrender; and in it, most important leaders from Korea’s main ideological camps were at least...

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