Defensive Struggles or Forward-looking Efforts?: Tenancy Disputes in Colonial Korea, 1920-1932

Defensive Struggles or Forward-looking Efforts? Tenancy Disputes in Colonial Korea, 1920-1932 Gi-Wook Shin G amily-size tenancy had been a common feature of the nineteenthand early twentieth-century in East Asian and Southeast Asian countries , and its conduciveness to rural conflict has been subjected to extensive studies (Marks 1984; Mitchell 1968; Paige 1970; Smethurst 1986; Stinchcomb 1961; Waswo 1977; Wiens 1980; Zagoria 1975). For instance, Stinchcomb (1961) argued that family-sized tenancy is the form of land tenure most likely to produce intense class conflict among his five types of land tenure systems: the hacienda system, family shareholding, plantation agriculture, and capitalist agriculture with wage labor as well as family size tenancy. Citing evidence from a number of diverse regions including Asia, Europe, and Africa, he stressed that the conflicts over the share of the crops.between tenant and landlord, the immense social distance separating them, the technical ability of the peasant, and the leadership of wealthier tenants combine to produce political and class conflict. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 49th annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago (April 1990). I am very grateful to James B. Palais, Michael E. Robinson, CarterJ. Eckert, Clark Sorensen, Daniel Chirot, Elizabeth Perry, Sönju Y. Kim, and William Bradshaw for their constructive criticisms and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Choe Yoonwhan for her help. 3 4 Journal ofKorean Studies Korea was no exception in this regard. Korea had a history of tenancy from the fourteenth century until the land reforms in the post-war era (Kim Y. 1970; Shin 1973).* And tenancy related conflict was a prevalent form of rural conflict in colonial and liberated Korea; it became a major policy issue not only of the Japanese colonial government , but also the American Military Government and the Rhee government (Government-General of Korea 1929; Cho 1964). Especially during the Japanese colonial era, tenancy disputes became a "constant phenomenon" in rural society, occurring all over the country . During the 20 years from 1920 to 1939, a total of 140,969 disputes occurred, and 238,784 tenants and landlords were involved in disputes from 1920 to 1936 (Government-General of Korea 1940, pp. 26-27). While many studies have been done to explain the causes and consequences of tenancy disputes in colonial Korea, most of the previous studies have overemphasized (1) the defensive nature of disputes due to extreme inequality and poverty in rural society, and (2) the ideological motivations behind these disputes, such as anticolonialism and/or socialism (Asada 1973, pp. 149-275; Cho 1979; Ho 1963; Kwön 1979). They argue thatJapanese colonialism brought about extreme rural inequality and poverty, and with the rapid polarization of rural class structure, starving peasantsjoined nationalist and/or Communist movements in forms of tenancy disputes. Certainly this line ofinterpretation has some merits, but it is only a partial explanation and needs more careful study. As I will show below, the disputes were primarily reformist rather than revolutionary in nature and their primary concerns were rooted in concrete economic interests , not political or ideological issues. Also, overstress ofthe defensive nature of tenancy disputes cannot properly explain the different forms and nature of the disputes. While tenancy disputes occurred all over the country in colonial Korea, there were some changes in the nature of disputes over time and the frequency of disputes varied across the nation. In the early to mid-1920s, tenancy disputes were offensive, large-scaled, well organized , and often successful, whereas in the depression years they 1. Tenancy was completely abolished in North Korea through its 1946 land reform. In South Korea, tenancy became also very negligible after the 1950 land reform; in 1957, for instance, 88.1 percent of the rural population were full owner cultivators. For a discussion on the recent tendency of growing tenancy rates in South Korea, see Chang (1988), pp. 146-75 and Burmeister (1990), pp. 713-14. Shin: Defensive Struggles or Forward-looking Efforts?5 became defensive in nature, decreased in scale, and were unsuccessful in consequence. Also, most disputes centered in the southern commercialized areas. How and why did the...