Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea by Albert L. Park, and: Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910 by Yumi Moon (review)

If you sit a group of historians of modern Korea around a table and ask them to discuss Korea in the first half of the twentieth century, it is likely that, before too long, an argument will break out. Seventy years after the Japanese empire collapsed, ending Japanese colonial rule over Korea, the question of how to interpret the colonial period continues to provoke heated discussions both within the academic community in Korea and between scholars in Korea and those based elsewhere.

The first issue that is likely to cause trouble is the impact of thirty-five years of Japanese rule, from 1910 to 1945, on Korea’s post-1945 economic and political development. A minority of Korean historians argue that independent Korea was able to benefit from the railroad and communication networks laid down by Japanese colonial authorities, as well as from the industrialization and improvements in public education and public health that proceeded during those thirty-five years of colonial rule.¹ The majority, especially vocal in Korea itself, adamantly reject any suggestion that Korea benefited from Japanese rule, declaring instead that when the Japanese seized control of the peninsula they kept Koreans from modernizing on their own in their own way.² These nationalistic historians often go on to maintain that those who contend otherwise are trying to excuse the brutality of the Japanese colonial authorities.

A related, and equally contentious, issue concerns collaboration: identifying who assisted the Japanese colonial government and explaining why they did so. In 2009, well over half a century after the end of Japanese colonial rule, a massive biographical dictionary of collaborators with the colonial authorities was published in Korea.³ Since many of the individuals named are related to members of the current political elite in South Korea (for example, Park Chung-hee, former president of South Korea and father of current president Park Geun-hye, is listed because he trained in the Manchurian Military Academy and, after graduating, served as an officer in the imperial army), the topic continues to be controversial. Koreans on the left side of the political spectrum try to expand the list of collaborators in order to discredit the right (among whom their descendants are more likely to be found in today’s South Korea), while those on the right try to shorten that list as much as they possibly can.

Despite the significant differences over such issues, there is one point on which historians usually agree: Koreans in the first half of the twentieth century, with the exception of Buddhists, were generally nationalistic. A recent monograph has problematized the claim that Korean Buddhist leaders should be seen as collaborators.⁴ Nevertheless, Buddhists are usually contrasted negatively with Protestant Christians (Catholics are not viewed as favorably by nationalistic historians) and members of Korea’s oldest organized indigenous religion, known as Tonghak from its founding in 1860 until 1905 and Ch’ŏndogyo afterwards. Since the vast majority of those who signed the seminal 1 March 1919 Korean declaration of independence belonged to those two religious communities, they have been able to bask in the warmth of a nationalistic image and been spared much of the opprobrium Buddhists have had to endure because of the perception that they were more willing to work with the Japanese.

Both of the books under review here complicate the dominant narrative that portrays Christian and Ch’ŏndogyo leaders as consistently nationalistic and resisting of the Japanese. Yumi Moon, in her study of the Tonghak-related Ilchinhoe in the years leading up to Korea’s annexation in 1910, stands much more explicitly against this narrative than does...