Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (review)

Colonial assimilation policies in history entailed heavy emotional tolls. The imposition of an alien language on colonized subjects, for example, brought strenuous resistance to forcible acculturation; measures to incorporate the natives into political participation, if any, did not ensure political and civil equality. Assimilation was a corollary of imperial policy to obliterate the national identity of the colonized people and at the same time separate them systematically from the colonizers. Japanese colonial rule in Korea—Korea became a protectorate in 1905, followed by formal annexation in 1910; it remained under Japanese domination until 1945—seemed to combine the worst kinds of assimilation. Koreans were required to undergo cultural and even spiritual assimilation while subject to stark discrimination as an inferior people.

In his new book, Mark Caprio argues that assimilation was the core agenda in Japanese colonial policies in Korea but that it failed because the diffusive rhetoric of commitment to assimilation did not materialize in practice. His copious evidence from newspapers, government documents, and personal accounts reveals the hollowness of the Japanese call for assimilation. As the author notes, the blatant contradiction between the officially professed ideology of naisen ittai (Japan and Korea as one body) and the reality of discrimination and segregation doomed the assimilation approach and Japanese colonial rule.

The view that Japanese colonial policy in Korea was marred by quintessential contradictions is not new. Yanaihara Tadao, one of the foremost Japanese liberal intellectuals, pointed out in 1937 that Japan required of the colonized people "profound, not superficial, Japanization," even to a psychological level, but this "assimilatory colonial policy, while demanding economic and social integration of the colonized, refused the assimilation of political rights."¹ Japan's continued failure to grant suffrage to colonial subjects destined its domination in Korea to become "a despotic rule unprecedented in the world."² Caprio's careful documentation of the fallacy of Japanese assimilation policy and the Korean people's grievances, resentment, and—not infrequently—confusion about its mendacity validates Yanaihara's eloquent indictment. It is important then to ask what kept the Japanese on the path of seemingly blind pursuit of this ill-conceived and ill-executed assimilation policy, especially when other imperial powers in the early twentieth century had more or less abandoned the assimilation approach and embraced a more cooptative and accommodationist policy.

One of the goals in this book is to "defin[e] Japanese colonialism in global terms" (p. 17). Indeed, the most interesting part of the book is the comparison of Japanese and European colonialism and their assimilation policies. There are excellent discussions in the first two chapters. The author relies on the theoretical notions of internal and peripheral colonization, as opposed to external colonialism. The examples of internal and peripheral colonization include the English expansion into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the French incorporation of Algeria, and Germany's takeover of Alsace and Lorraine.³ External colonization refers to European expansion into Africa and Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Traditionally, historians of European imperialism did not regard English expansion into the "Celtic fringe" as a subject of their study. More recently, however, there has been a trend to look for deep historical roots of imperialism, and scholars have focused on "internal colonialism" or "continental imperialism" as an essential variant of European state formation.⁴ Internal colonialism, equated with state building, is distinguished from external colonialism, in that the former placed emphasis on assimilation. Caprio argues that the cases of internal colonialism were the models for the Japanese: "Japanese were inspired by British, Prussian, and French efforts in their peripheral territories, rather than these states' efforts in their external possessions" (p. 16).

Caprio does recognize that the largely disastrous experience of English imperialism in Ireland and that of the French in Algeria make it difficult to treat them the same as the developments in Wales and Scotland. He thus calls the Irish and Algerian cases peripheral colonization, which "served...