Creating the Sacred and the Secular in Colonial Korea

The thirty-five-year-long Japanese occupation of Korea (1910–1945) stimulated a significant transformation of the traditional Korean concept of religion, which in turn stimulated changes in the Korean understanding of the secular and the sacred. Traditional Korea lacked an explicit definition of religion. Under Japanese rule, Koreans absorbed the modern Japanese bureaucratic definition of religion, which also included a definition of what Japanese colonial authorities came to call "quasi-religion." Moreover, when the Japanese brought State Shinto onto the peninsula and declared that it was sacred and secular, and not religious, they stimulated the Korean people into thinking of the sacred and the secular as distinct categories that to some degree overlapped with, but did not map perfectly onto, the distinction between the religious and the non-religious. By demanding that Shinto be treated as constituting a sacred secular realm, sacred to the extent that Shinto deities had to be treated by everyone as supernatural entities who deserved ritual homage and their shrines deemed inviolable, the colonial authorities created an implicit understanding of the secular sacred as superior to the religious realm, which had a more limited claim to the sacred label. Moreover, the Japanese-imposed category of "quasi-religion" caused Koreans to distinguish between that which was secular and unacceptable, such as shamanism, and that which claimed to be sacred and religious but was also unacceptable. By 1945, the categories in which Koreans placed various features of their religious culture were very different from what they had been in 1910.