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

Well over sixty years after Japanese colonial rule over Korea (1910-1945) came to a sudden end, it is still difficult to find an objective and dispassionate evaluation of what happened to the peninsula and its people during the thirty-five years of Japanese rule. Most Koreans continue to insist that anything positive that emerged during this period would have happened anyway. They are adamant that industrialization and the expansion of public education and public health facilities, for example, would still have taken place even if Korea had been left alone. Those of a nationalistic bent usually go on to angrily accuse the Japanese of retarding rather than accelerating Korea's march to modernity and contend that any assertions to the contrary are an insult to the intelligence and determination of the Korean people, who were clearly capable of constructing their own path into the modern world. Many Japanese, on the other hand, continue to believe that their nation brought the benefits of modern civilization to a people mired in stagnation and unable to help themselves, and that Koreans who refuse to acknowledge this contribution are blinded by their nationalistic biases and should be embarrassed by their failure to show appreciation where it is due.

Mark Caprio, as an American scholar of Korean history teaching at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, is uniquely qualified to avoid the nationalistic extremes of the debate over the right and wrong, and the impact, of Japanese colonial rule. Using both Korean and Japanese sources, and an impartial eye, he examines one aspect of the colonial period, Japan's official policy of welcoming the Korean people into the Japanese political and cultural community, and he comes up with some startling conclusions.

The introductory paragraph of Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 will surprise many Koreans. Caprio cites a prominent Korean living in Seoul bragging, in 1940, that his eldest son had been accepted for service in the Imperial Army. A footnote adds that over 250,000 Koreans applied to serve in the Japanese military in 1942 alone and that over the course of the Pacific War over 150,000 Koreans proudly wore a Japanese military uniform, with 6,377 paying the ultimate price of death in battle for their loyalty to the emperor and the empire. In the remainder of this book, Caprio makes clear, however, that the Japanese attempt to assimilate the population of Korea was ultimately a failure, despite the many young Korean men who volunteered to fight on Japan's behalf. Moreover, he explains that much of that failure was the result of Japanese prejudice rather than Korean resistance.

Providing a nuanced account of both Japanese policies toward colonial subjects and of reactions to those policies, Caprio challenges the popular nationalistic line that Koreans were almost universally opposed to Japanese rule and cooperated only under duress. He also challenges the counterclaim that Japanese rhetoric and the reality of the nation's rule were one and the same, that the Japanese government seized control of the peninsula to help the Korean people and bring them into the modern world and consistently acted with their best interests at heart. His well-documented account of how the colonial government actually interacted with those it ruled, and how those it ruled viewed that government, undermines the assumptions behind much of what has been said and written about the colonial period.

Before he gets into the specifics of Japanese colonial rule over Korea, Caprio first discusses colonialism and imperialism in general. He notes that a colonizer can adopt one of two approaches: direct rule, making the colony an integral part of the mother country (favored by the French) or indirect rule, utilizing local elites and indigenous practices to control the local population (favored by the British). He points out, however, that in actual practice the difference between the French and British approaches was not very wide. The French accepted as full members of their community only...