"Brokers of empire": Japanese settler colonialism in Korea, 1910-1937

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

THESIS ACCEPTANCE CERTIFICATE The undersigned, appointed by the Division Department

o f H is t o r y

Committee have examined a thesis entitled "B rokers o f Em pire": J a p a n ese S e t t l e r C o lo n ia lis m in K orea, 1910 - 1937 presented by

jun

UCHIDA

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and hereby certify that it is worthy of acceptance. Signature Typed name Signature... Typed name 4 Signature. 7. P r o f e s s o r P e te r Duus typed name........................................................ Signature.... Typed name.

Date,

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“BROKERS OF EMPIRE”: JAPANESE SETTLER COLONIALISM IN KOREA, 1910-1937

A thesis presented by Jun Uchida to The Department o f History in partial fulfillment o f the requirements for the degree o f Doctor o f Philosophy in the subject o f History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2005

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UMI Number: 3174057

Copyright 2005 by Uchida, Jun

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Thesis Advisor: Professor Andrew Gordon

Jun Uchida

Abstract “Brokers o f Empire”: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1910-1937

The dissertation examines the role and actions of Japanese settlers in colonial Korea. They formed one o f the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century, and yet their history remains largely unknown. Scholars have traditionally approached the colonial period either from the top-down, focusing on the administration or exploitation of the colony, or from the bottom up, focusing on Korean nationalistic movements. Moving beyond this dichotomized approach, this work examines settlers as a unique lens through which to identify the multiple levels of engagement that shaped the colonial relationship between Japanese and Koreans. Settlers are conceptualized as brokers of empire to highlight the role of non-state actors, who intervened in the colonial project in informal and internally contested ways. The argument in the dissertation is three-fold. First, settlers played an important role in supporting Japan’s nation-building and empire-building at the grassroots level. Unlike most European imperial powers, Japan began its projects of modernization and overseas expansion simultaneously. Ordinary Japanese served as migrants, merchants, and political fixers in mediating the two processes, while embodying the anxieties of Japan as a fledgling nation-empire. Second, settlers provided a unique vector o f influence in colonial governance. They developed their own power, culture, and ideology that complemented as well as complicated the Government-General ’s rule. Settlers explain the intense and yet fragile nature of Japanese colonial power itself.

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Third, Japanese and Koreans engaged with each other at multiple levels, complicating the binary view of colonial rule as a zero-sum conflict between Japanese oppression and Korean resistance. In spheres as diverse as political economy, discourse, and everyday life, settlers, Koreans, and officials pursued their own interests and agendas that dynamically intersected with one another. And each of these entanglements became a building block of colonial modernity, giving rise to pluralistic identities. Overall, the dissertation employs an interactive as well as interdisciplinary approach to colonial history. The actions of settlers, Koreans, and officials are examined as mutually constitutive processes using the combined methods of history, anthropology, and discursive analysis. These micro-level engagements are further explored within the empire-wide context of modernity and the comparative context of twentieth-century imperialism.

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Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to numerous individuals without whom this enormous undertaking could never have been completed. I would like to offer my sincere gratitude for their support and inspiration that have guided my long intellectual journey and have now brought it to fruition. My thesis advisor, Professor Andrew Gordon, has been the most incredible mentor as well as the most critical reader of my work. At every stage of this project, from formulating a problem to writing the conclusion, he offered me sharp intellectual insights as a scholar, thorough and penetrating comments as a reader, and warm words of encouragement as an advisor. This dissertation owes the most to him. I have been extremely fortunate to have the support of another distinguished historian, Professor Peter Duus, whose masterful work on the Japanese activities in pre-annexation Korea first inspired me to embark upon this dissertation project. In deepening my analysis over the course of years, I have also received his tremendous intellectual generosity and insightful comments on my papers and drafts, rough or polished, that I selfishly sent him across the continent and the ocean. It was Professor Carter Eckert who first introduced me to the richness and complexities of Korean history. He has not only provided me with constant support for my work, but has taught me the importance of rigorously engaging with Korean history in order to understand modem Japan. At home with multi-language archives and attentive to multiple voices in a seemingly uniform past, his work on colonial Korea has provided me with a model of critical scholarship to which I aspire. In addition, I am grateful to Professors Harold Bolitho, Dani Botsman, and Albert Craig for their comments on my seminar paper and dissertation prospectus, which helped me frame my project. But before I embarked upon my dissertation, many other scholars guided and shaped my growth as an historian-in-training. At Cornell, Professors Victor Koschmann and Michael v

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Kammen inspired me as teachers and scholars so much that I switched my career goal and decided to pursue history at the graduate level. At UC Berkeley, I made my first forays into the study of Japanese imperialism under the guidance of four brilliant minds: Professor Andrew Barshay, whose scholarly devotion and ability to move freely across disciplines and national borders both inspired and intimidated me; Professor Elizabeth Berry, whose terrifyingly sharp questions always pushed my work to a new level of analysis; Professor Irwin Scheiner, who taught me the importance of having a strong mondai ishikv, and Professor Thomas Havens, whose intellectual generosity and mentorship simply knew no bounds. They nurtured me with warmth and patience, and for that I am forever grateful. Two years o f research in Japan and South Korea from 2001 to 2003 were financially supported by a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, research grants from the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Korea Institute at Harvard University, and the Matsushita International Foundation Research Grant. Without these grants available to non-US citizens, I would not have had any means of carrying out such extensive research in Japan and Korea. During those years, I benefited immensely from the guidance and assistance of many individuals and institutions. I must thank, first of all, Professor Kimura Kenji of Shimonoseki City University, my Japanese advisor and a pioneer scholar of the Japanese settlers in Korea. I cannot thank him enough for agreeing to take me as his disciple and offering me constant help, invaluable advice, and information about rare archives that were all indispensable to my research. His intellectual rigor and generosity have inspired and enriched me as an historian in every way. I have been truly blessed by the opportunity to work with him. I was also fortunate to obtain the guidance and friendship o f members of the Chosenshi Kenkyukai, the Nihon Shokuminchi Kenkyukai, the Chosen Chiiki Shiryo Kenkyukai, and the Post-Colonial Benkyokai. My affiliation with these dynamic vi

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communities of scholars, independent researchers, and graduate students has enabled me to immerse myself fully in the local scholarly networks, and present and publish my research findings in Japanese. I owe special thanks to Yoshizawa Kayoko for her kind help and extraordinary friendship, as well as her leadership in our collaborative project to collect oral testimonies and unpublished memoirs from former settlers. I would also like to thank Professor Son Chae-won for his in-depth guidance in my preparation for fieldwork in Japan and Korea; Higuchi Yuichi and Professor Yi Hyeong-nang for their expert advice on sources; Professor Hashiya Hiroshi, Kamiya Niji, and Professor Takasaki Soji for sharing with me the fruits of their research; Yoshida Mitsuo and Kasuya Ken’ichi for their sharp commentary; and Itagaki Ryusuke, Okubo Yuri, Ohama Ikuko, and Sin Chang-gon for their comparative and interdisciplinary insights. In Japan, my archival “dig” was supported by an even more extensive list of individuals and institutions. I would especially like to thank Professor Kawa Kaoru, Tsuji Hironori, and the staff of the Yuho Archive at Gakushuin University for introducing me to rare and unpublished sources on settlers and transcriptions of recorded interviews of former colonial bureaucrats. I am likewise grateful to Pak Chae-il and Kono Yasunori of the Cultural Center Arirang for allowing me to stay in the stacks for extended hours, and offering me tea and cakes for frequent study breaks. I would also like to thank Professor Kase Kazutoshi for sponsoring my affiliation with the Institute for Social Science at Tokyo University as a visiting researcher. For conducting research in Korea, I owe special thanks to Ho Y5ng-nang and the staff of the Kuksa P’yonch’an Wiwonhoe for introducing me to the enormous digital archive and allowing me access to uncataloged materials including previously untapped police records and other classified documents. I am also grateful to Anzako Yuka and Professor Chong Chae-jong for their generous help and useful information on the local archives in vii

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Seoul, and Professor Chong Chae-ch’ol and Pak Sung-jun for their kind assistance in conducting fieldwork. The staff of the Naksongdae Archive and the Seoul City Research Institute at Seoul City University also provided service and assistance beyond the call of duty. Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Ms. Yi Suk-cha for her tremendous hospitality in letting me stay in her apartment and feeding me at her restaurant during my research in Korea. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the numerous individuals who agreed to meet with me for personal interviews and respond to my questionnaires. First o f all, I would like to thank Fujimoto Hideo and members of the Chuo Nikkan Kyokai for sharing with me their experiences in Korea, providing further personal contacts, and holding round-table discussion meetings on my research topic. I am particularly grateful to two interviewees, Aoki Etsuko and Kudo Masumi, both of whom sadly passed away before this project saw completion. Nakao Minoru, who has over many years headed the umbrella organization of settler school alumni associations, also helped me circulate my questionnaires and put me in touch with a variety of settler repatriates’ organizations. For conducting interviews in Korea, I owe much to Sasaki Kuniyuki for allowing me to attend the school reunion of his alma mater, the Seoul Industrial School (present-day Seoul Technical High School) and introducing me to his former Korean classmates. I would especially like to thank Yi Po-hye and the alumni of the Seoul Industrial School for taking the time to meet with me and sharing with me their colonial experiences, in spite o f their busy schedules. What would have been a solitary process of writing was made more enjoyable by participation in a dissertation writers’ group with Maijan Boogert, Michael Burtscher, Matthew Fraleigh, Chong Bum Kim, Izumi Nakayama, Jin Kyu Robertson, Hiraku Shimoda, and Karen Thomber. I am deeply indebted to their feedback and friendship that have sustained me physically and psychologically over the last two years. During the final stage of viii

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the write-up process, Dr. K. E. Duffin was also of tremendous help in structuring my thoughts and conveying my points more effectively. Along the way many friends, colleagues, and scholars have offered me valuable comments and criticism on what became part of my dissertation. I have been extremely fortunate to have such supportive and generous colleagues as Ken Robinson, Sue Jean Cho, and Joe Wicentowski who have read my drafts at various stages of their formation. Professors Mark Caprio, Caroline Elkins, Tak Matsusaka, Susan Pedersen, and Louise Young have also offered me useful and valuable feedback on papers that I presented at conferences and workshops. Finally I must thank my three remarkable senpai: Kyu Hyun Kim for offering me untiring support and guidance; Hyung Gu Lynn for providing me with a model of cross-cultural scholarship; and Yosuke Nirei for always pushing me to think more fiercely and critically. Throughout my graduate career, Ms. Ruiko Connor of the Reischauer Institute, Mrs. Myong-suk Chandra of the Korea Institute, and Ms. Gail Rock o f the History Department have taken care of me as the kindest administrators and counselors on matters ranging from professional to personal. I am deeply in their debt. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, especially my mother, Keiko Uchida, for everything. She has given me unconditional love and support and has always brought me laughter and sunshine, which have kept me going even through the most arduous times.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES............................................................................................xii

PARTI EMERGENCE, 1876-1919........................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: Korea and Japan.....................................................................................................1 Studying Japanese Colonialism............................................................................................. 5 Japanese Settlers in Korea....................................................................................................11 Japanese Settler Colonialism................................................................................................14 Brokers of Em pire................................................................................................................ 20 Sources, Methods, and Organization.................................................................................. 24 CHAPTER 2: The Japanese Penetration into Korea, 1876-1910.............................................28 The Early Japanese Migration and Settlement................................................................... 32 Settlers during the Sino-Japanese W ar............................................................................... 40 Settler Political A ctivism .................................................................................................... 43 Building Railroads................................................................................................................45 Settler under Protectorate Rule............................................................................................ 50 The Growth of Settler Communities and Self-government...............................................56 “Golden-Age” of Settler Journalism under Ito...................................................................67 Japanese Teachers................................................................................................................ 72 Settler Advisors in the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement..............................................77 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................89 CHAPTER 3: Annexation and “Military Rule” in the 1910s................................................... 96 From Subalterns to Sub-imperialists: the Emergence of Brokers of Empire.................. 96 Military R ule.......................................................................................................................108 Settlers under Military R ule.............................................................................................. 117 Dual Structure in Everyday Life of the Colony............................................................... 125 Joint Chambers of Commerce........................................................................................... 143 Journalists and Settler Discourse on Korea and Koreans................................................ 152 Conclusion........................................................................................................................... 165

PART I I IN ACTION, 1919-1931........................................................................ CHAPTER 4: Settlers, Koreans, and the State: Uneasy Partners in the Colonial Enterprise 168 The March First Movement, 1919: A Watershed............................................................. 168 Saito’s Cultural R ule..........................................................................................................172 Settlers as Political Advisors............................................................................................. 178 The Information Committee.............................................................................................. 187 Fostering Pro-Japanese Collaborators...............................................................................192 Settler Reactions to the March First Movement............................................................... 198 CHAPTER 5: Colonists and Collaborators: the Assimilation Cam paign..............................207 The Dominkai..................................................................................................................... 207 Assimilation as Social W ork.............................................................................................226 Limits of the Assimilation Campaign.............................................................................. 229 Grass-Roots Assimilationists............................................................................................234 Cultural Nationalism versus Cultural Imperialism.......................................................... 246 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 269

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CHAPTER 6: Building Korean Industry: Cooperative Capitalist Development................. 272 Industrial Commission of 1921......................................................................................... 274 Lobbying for Korean Industry........................................................................................... 278 Class, Nation, and Empire: Consolidation of Transport Firm s...................................... 295 Conclusion........................................................................................................................... 318 CHAPTER 7: “Assimilation” versus “Self-Rule”: Suffrage Movement............................... 321 Local Political Reforms......................................................................................................322 Lobbying for Local Autonomy.......................................................................................... 327 Suffrage versus Self Rule.................................................................................................. 336 Joint Political Movements................................................................................................. 351 Conclusion...........................................................................................................................363

PART III AS ORGANS OF THE STATE, 1931-1937.................................................

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CHAPTER 8: Korea and Japan: Partners in the Manchurian D ream.................................... 366 The Impact of the Manchurian Incident........................................................................... 370 Manchuria as a Site of Naisen Yuwa.................................................................................375 Manchurian Market and Colonial Industrialization........................................................ 386 Making of “Greater Keijo” as Industrial C ity..................................................................392 Colonial Dependent Development................................................................................... 406 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 426 Chapter 9: Colonial Modernity and Interpenetration between State and Society.................. 429 Reforms in Local Politics and Institutionalization of Settler Pow er..............................431 Joint Residents’ Campaigns..............................................................................................439 Local Assemblies as Battlegrounds for Nationalist Politics.......................................... 456 Moral Suasion (kyoka) Campaigns................................................................................... 463 Move toward “Imperialization” ........................................................................................480 Women and the Life Improvement Campaign................................................................ 487 Mobilizing Y outh.............................................................................................................. 494 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 499

PART IV CONCLUSION..............................................................................

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CHAPTER 10: Conclusion........................................................................................................ 503 Nation and C olony............................................................................................................ 503 Brokers of Empire: Settler Colonialism........................................................................... 506 Dynamics of Colonial Encounter..................................................................................... 511 Colonial M odernity........................................................................................................... 520 Postscript: Betwixt and Between the Colonial Past and the Post-Colonial Present 522 Appendix: Settler Leaders in Seoul, 1910-1930s.............................................................526 Selected Bibliography....................................................................................................... 531

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LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES

Maps Map of Korea circa 1910

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Map of Seoul circa 1930

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Tables 1. Growth of Japanese Population in Korea, 1880-1944

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2. Occupations of Japanese Residents in Korea, End of 1907

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3. Occupations of Japanese Residents in Korea, 1910-1940

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4. Growth of Japanese Population in Cities, 1890-1940

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5. Occupations of Japanese Residents in Seoul, End of 1910

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6. Main Pro-Japanese/Assimilationist Organizations Formed in 1919-1925

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7. Japanese-run and Korean-run Factories in Seoul, End of 1933

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North Hamgyong

South Hamgyong

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Map o f Korea circa 1910

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PART I EM ERGENCE, 1876-1919

CHAPTER 1: Korea and Japan Like all other empires in the twentieth century, the Japanese empire was bom from a modem nation’s quest for wealth and power. Japan’s emergence coincided with the revolutionary transformation of imperialism, from a mission delegated to a few chartered companies or “men on the spot,” into a social project of a modem nation-state fueled by the globalizing force o f industrial capitalism. The Japanese project of building a “rich and strong nation” (fukoku kyohei) thus entailed not only Westernization at home but also joining Western imperialists abroad. As Peter Duus elegantly put it, “the pursuit of an expansionist agenda was part and parcel o f the larger mimetic project of the Meiji elites.”1 Yet unlike its European predecessors, Japan’s path to modernity and empire traced an unusually steep trajectory. While European imperialism in the late nineteenth century was built upon centuries of overseas exploration and driven by a century o f industrial revolution, the Japanese launched both processes more or less simultaneously.2 Having narrowly escaped the fate of China and other Asian nations that succumbed to Western imperialistic ambitions, the Meiji government began to look overseas just as it embarked on a crash modernization program in the 1870s.3 And in the space of a few decades, the Japanese had built not only an

1Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration o f Korea, 1895-1910 (Berkeley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1995), 12. 2 The only exception among the European imperialists is Germany, which, like Meiji Japan, modernized and expanded overseas more or less simultaneously. On the German empire, see Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978) and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918, trans. by Kim Traynor (Dover, N.H.: Berg Publishers, 1985). 3 The Seikan ron or the argument for a Korean invasion was discussed by the Meiji leadership under the influence of Saigo Takamori in 1873. But the priority on domestic reform led to the cancellation of the expedition.

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infrastructure of a modem state, but also a fledgling structure of a colonial empire. Imitating the practices of Western gunboat diplomacy, Meiji Japan used its new military might to force Korea to open its doors to trade and then to defeat Qing China in an imperialist rivalry over the peninsula, extracting Taiwan as its first overseas territory as well as a symbol of new Japanese leadership in Asia. From the beginning, Korea lay at the heart of Japan’s concurrent and dialectical projects of modernization and imperialism.4 First and foremost concerned with national security,5 Meiji expansionism was propelled by the logic of “a cordon o f sovereignty” overlaid with “a cordon of interest,” which envisioned the creation o f an outer rim of Japan’s informal domination over its weaker Asian neighbors in order to protect and guarantee the inner line of Japan’s sovereignty.6 According to this geopolitical view, Korea was a “dagger thrust at the heart of Japan” and critical to its national security. Korea was also a gateway to the Chinese continent where imperial Japan could emerge onto the international stage, as well as a strategic concern abutting Manchuria that was seen as an essential buffer against Russia.

4 Louise Young has offered a useful concept of “total empire” to examine the relationship between modernity and empire as a dialectical process: “just as modernization conditioned the growth of empire, the process o f imperialism shaped the conditions of modem life.” See Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture o f Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1998), 11-12. In many ways, I see my work on settlers as a counterpoint to Young’s study which focuses on the story o f empire building in the metropole rather than in the colony. 5 Taiwan was an exception in the sense that it was acquired largely for reasons of prestige. 6 This notion was put forward by a Meiji statesman, Yamagata Aritomo, in the early 1890s. According to this rationale, to preempt and keep out the Western powers in Asia required the creation of a buffer contiguous to each new territory acquired in the form of concentric circles radiating from the home islands. The implication was that Japan would be mired in an endless cycle of expansion, which is indeed what seems to have occurred. Cloaked in the rhetoric of a Pan-Asianist struggle against Western imperialism, the Japanese empire pursued the program of establishing the East Asian Order that culminated into a more grandiose vision o f the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere during WW II. By the end of the war, Japan had grown into an imperial monolith encompassing formal colonies of Korea, Taiwan, southern Sakhalin (Karafuto), and the mandated islands of Micronesia (Nanyo), as well as having informal or military control over Manchuria, parts of China, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. It was precisely this problem of overextension that brought the ultimate demise of the Japanese empire in 1945.

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Korea, in short, was the key to Japan’s national and imperial construction. Indeed, it is not too far-fetched to say that from the Bakumatsu to the Meiji period the formation of Japanese nationalism, with its two diametrically opposed ideologies of continental expansionism and Pan-Asianism, revolved around the axis of Japan-Korean relations. Yet, it would be misleading to assume that the Japanese expanded into Korea according to a blueprint for conquest or an inevitable law o f monopolistic capitalism. The process was messier and more complicated. While openly and aggressively seeking economic rights and concessions in the peninsula, the fledgling imperial state with a meager home market struggled to persuade conservative domestic capitalists and financiers to invest in the politically unstable foreign soil. If Lenin’s theory fails to explain Meiji imperialism here, the explanation must lie elsewhere. We need to look, first of all, at a motley crew of ordinary and often lowly Japanese—merchants, sojourners, petty traders, prostitutes, adventurers, and carpetbaggers—who first ventured into the peninsula with modest capital or none at all, quite regardless of the security concerns and lofty goals of the Meiji statesmen. Since the Japanese government forced the “hermit kingdom” to open its ports to international trade in 1876, scores of Japanese, from southwestern prefectures and later from all over the archipelago, crossed the Tsushima Straits and flocked to the ports of Pusan and Inch’on in search of quick profit, adventure, labor, land, or simply a better life. The lives of these anonymous settlers were nonetheless inextricably intertwined with the Japanese government’s efforts to extend control over Korea, as demonstrated by the two imperialistic wars that propelled the Japanese colonization of Korea. When the Tonghak peasant rebellion erupted in the spring of 1894, the Meiji leaders followed the Chinese in rushing troops to Korea under the pretext of protecting Japanese residents from the insurgents, provoking a clash between the two armies in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5. While the Japanese government sent some 8,000 troops to remove the vestiges of Chinese tributary authority 3

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from Korea, the local Japanese residents provided food, shelter, and transportation to the soldiers, hoping that they would oust the dominance of Chinese merchants from the peninsula. After defeating the Chinese, the Meiji leaders continued to vie with Western investors for railway concessions in Korea, often at the prodding of clamoring Japanese settlers. And in 1904, when the Japanese government decided to go to war with Russia to circumvent its southward expansion from Manchuria into Korea, settlers and camp followers again supported the Japanese troop operations, with the expectation o f lucrative profit as well as national glory. Japan’s victory in each war led to further consolidation of its control over Korea, which was accompanied by a wave of migration and expansion of Japanese settlements around the peninsula. Each war, too, produced nouveaux riches, who became leaders of the local Japanese communities that functioned as nodes of the growing ambit of Japanese power. By the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, what began as a tiny enclave of merchants and sojourners had grown into the largest overseas Japanese community in the empire, numbering over 170,000. The physical entrenchment of Japanese in Korea, indeed, became a form of domination itself: the settlers developed their own inner dynamics and ideology as true “pioneers” of Korean progress who sacrificed their lives on the frontline o f empire. Japan’s colonization of Korea thus entailed two distinct processes of domination. On the one hand, the Meiji state built a formal ruling apparatus in the Korean peninsula and imposed new economic and social structures on the local society. On the other hand, ordinary Japanese migrated and settled in Korea largely of their own volition, and dominated treaty port commerce, pressed further into the interior, and penetrated into the local social fabric. They did so by capitalizing on the expanding framework of Japanese hegemony, but mostly operating outside the purview of Meiji officialdom. The activities and aspirations of these anonymous settlers are the subject of this study. 4

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Studying Japanese Colonialism Japanese expansion into Korea has been studied by roughly two camps o f scholars: historians of Korea and historians of Japanese imperialism. Before the 1980s, historians of Korea usually focused on the question of whether the Japanese had a long-term “plot” to conquer Korea that led to the final annexation of 1910. Many emphasized the aggressive and premeditated nature o f Japan’s march to Korean annexation, though a revisionist view also appeared.7 Accounts o f the colonial period similarly focused on assessing the destructive and exploitative impact of Japanese rule on the local Korean society, juxtaposing a portrait of Japanese as oppressors and that of Koreans as either defenseless victims or defiant resistors.8

7 This view was prevalent in both Korean and Japanese scholarship until the 1960s. For early works in Korean, see Pak Un-sik, Han ’guk t ’ongsa (Taegu: Talsong Inswae Chusik Hoesa, 1946); Chong Kyo, ed, Taehan kyenydn sa, 2 vols. (Seoul: Kuksa P ’yonch’an Wiwonhoe, 1957); Yi S6n-gun, Han ’guksa: ch ’oe kunsep’y on (Seoul: Uryu Munhwasa, 1961); and Mun Chong-ch’ang, KunseIlbon ui Choson ch ’im t’alsa (Seoul: Paengmundang, 1964). In Japanese, see Yamabe Kentaro’s Nikkan heigo shoshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966) and Nihon no Kankoku heigo (Tokyo: Taihei Shuppansha, 1966). Hilary Conroy in The Japanese Seizure o f Korea: 1868-1910: A Study o f Realism and Idealism in International Relations (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 1960) and Peter Duus in The Abacus and the Sword (1995) have convincingly refuted this “plot” theory. Conroy’s work offered the first revisionist analysis of Japan’s political relations with Korea and the underlying motivations for Japanese aggression in the pre-annexation period. It shows how three different groups of Japanese (liberals, realists, and reactionaries), in the course of debating the Korean problem, only gradually converged on the decisions culminating into the final annexation of Korea in 1910. See Conroy, 7-8, for the Korean scholars’ criticism of Conroy’s work as a justification of Japanese aggression and the subsequent debate his study generated among scholars of Korean history. Following Conroy’s study, C. I. Eugene Kim and Han-Kyo Kim, Korea and the Politics o f Imperialism, 1876-1910 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), and Shumpei Okamoto, The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) further demonstrated the predominance of national security concerns or “realism” in the Japanese policy toward the peninsula before annexation. 8 Until the 1980s, both Japanese and Korean works on colonial Korea were dominated by this binary, Marxist interpretation of the colonial period. For representative works, see Chon Sdk-tam and Ch’oe Yungyu, eds., 19-segi huban ’gi: Ilche t'ongch ’i malgi ui Choson sahoe kydngjesa (P’yongyang: Choson Nodongdang Ch’ulp’ansa, 1959); Kim Yun-hwan and Kim Nak-chung, eds., Han ’guk nodong undongsa (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1970); Yamabe Kentaro, Nihon tochika no Chosen (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1971); Pak Kyong-sik, Nihon teikokushugi no Chosen shihai (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1973); Pak Hy5n-ch’ae, Minjung kwa kyongje (Seoul: Chongusa, 1978); Kajimura Hideki, Chosen shi (Tokyo: K5dansha, 1977); Kang Tong-jin, Nihon no Chosen shihai seisaku shi kenkyu: senkyuhyakunijunendai o chushin to shite (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1979); and Sin Yong-ha, Han ’guk minjok tongnip undongsa yon ’g u (Seoul: Uryu Munhwasa, 1985). In Japan, scholars of Korea were also reacting to the appearance, especially in the 1960s, o f memoirs and monographs written by former colonial officials and settlers that tended to justify Japanese colonial rule by stressing its positive contribution to local development while downplaying its oppressive impact. To counter and overcome this biased historical view, still very much alive today,

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By contrast, historians of Japanese imperialism, mostly economic historians, were primarily concerned with the nature and development of Japanese capitalism. Their works mainly focused on the question of how Japan’s capitalistic transformation and imperialistic expansion proceeded hand in hand.9 While a methodological gap continues to divide the two camps, they have been brought into closer dialogue since the 1980s, when the rise of the East Asian NIEs inspired a thorough re-examination of the impact of Japan’s colonialism on its former Asian colonies. In contrast to the earlier tendency of historians of Korea to treat colonialism and development as mutually exclusive categories, the new debate has revolved around the question of

became one of the main purposes of scholarly research in this period. A similar scholarly trend can be discerned in most English works that appeared before the 1980s, though their debate on the economic impact of Japanese imperialism became increasingly complex in the late 1970s. For English works on Japanese imperialism in Korea, see for instance, Wonmo Dong, “Japanese Colonial Policy and Practice in Korea, 1905-1945: A Study in Assimilation” (PhD. diss., Georgetown University, 1965); Andrew C. Nahm, ed. Korea Under Japanese Colonial Rule: Studies o f the Policy and Techniques o f Japanese Colonialism (The Center for Korean Studies, Western Michigan University, 1973); C. I. Eugene Kim and Doretha E. Mortimore, eds., Korea's Response to Japan: The Colonial Period, 1910-1945 (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1977); Sang-Chul Suh, Growth and Structural Changes in the Korean Economy, 1910-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Key-Hiuk Kim, The Last Phase o f the East Asian World Order: Korea, Japan and the Chinese Empire, 1860-1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). For the historiographical context of this period, also see Mark Peattie and Ramon Myers’ response to Andre Schmid’s “Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem’ in the Historiography of Modem Japan” (Journal o f Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (November 2000): 951-976), in Journal o f Asian Studies 60:3 (August 2001): 813. 9 Three representative theories on Japanese capitalism and its relationship to imperialism emerged in this period. Murakami Katsuhiko emphasized the interrelationship between the development o f capitalism and the evolution o f imperialism to explain the precocious nature in which Japan’s military expansion occurred before reaching the stage of monopoly capitalism. See his “Nihon teikokushugi to shokuminchi,” in Shakai Keizai Shigakkai, ed. Shakai keizai shigaku no kadai to tenbo (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1984). By contrast, Asada Kyoji proposed a new methodology to focus on the “three pillars” of imperialism (control over land, finance, and railroads) in analyzing individual colonies as well as a mutually interactive relationship between imperialism and the colony. See his “Nihon shokuminshi kenkyu no genjo to mondaiten,” Rekishi Hyoron 300 (April, 1975). Kobayashi Hideo later criticized Asada’s theory for treating the three pillars as fixed and unchanging determinants of Japanese imperialism. Kobayashi stressed the need to examine how these pillars changed at various stages of imperialism, while also paying attention to other factors such as Western imperialist pressures and local resistance. See his “Jugonen senso to shokuminchi,” in Kindai Nihon keizaishi o manabu, vol. 2, ed. Ishii Kanji, Unno Fukuju, and Nakamura Masanori (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1977). For a useful historiographical essay on the diversification of methodology in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, see “Kaisetsu: teikokushugi to shokuminchi,” in Teikokushugi to shokuminchi, Tenbo Nihon Rekishi 20, ed. Yanagisawa Asobu and Okabe Makio (Tokyo: Tokyodo Shuppan, 2001), 4-5.

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evaluating socio-economic changes (especially the rise and growth o f Korean capitalism) under Japanese colonialism, and the continuity or discontinuity o f the impact of Japanese colonial rule on the post-war Asian economic development.10 In the 1990s, the debate on Korean capitalism was taken to a new level, when scholars began to challenge the binary terms of the older debate on exploitation versus development by exploring the idea of “colonial modernization” or “colonial industrialization.” Questioning the methodology of the North and South Korean nationalistic historiography to seek the “sprouts” (maenga) of indigenous capitalism within the Choson dynasty,11 these revisionist scholars instead

10 This revisionist trend was led by An Pyong-jik, Nakamura Tetsu, Hori Kazuo, Ho Su-yol, and other Korean and Japanese economic historians. They challenged the nationalistic historiography through rigorous statistical analysis to demonstrate the impact of Japanese colonial rule on the rise of modem capitalism in Korea. According to Matsumoto Takenori, the South Korean debate on Korean capitalism in the 1980s largely centered on the issue of methodology, that is, whether to focus on the “contemporaneity” or the varying “stages of growth” between the colony and the metropole in analyzing economic changes experienced by Korea under Japanese colonial rule. See Matsumoto Takenori, “Shokuminchiki Chosen noson ni okeru eisei, iryo jigyo no tenkai: ‘shokuminchi kindaisei’ ni kansuru shiron,” Shokei Ronso (Kanagawa Daigaku Keizai Gakkai) 34, no. 4 (March 1999): 1-35. For an argument on the continuity of Japanese economic influence on post-liberation Korea, see Nakamura Tetsu, Kindai sekaishizo no saikdsei: Higashi Ajia no shiten kara (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1991). For an argument on discontinuity, see Hashiya Hiroshi, “ 1930, 40 nendai no Chosen shakai no seikaku o megutte,” Chosenshi Kenkyukai Ronbunshu 27 (March 1990): 129-154. The first comprehensive English-language study o f Japanese colonialism, Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), also reflected this revisionist trend to provide a more balanced and multidimensional account of Japanese colonial efforts. n For the “sprouts” theory, see Pak Won-s5n, Kaekchu (Seoul: Yonse Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 1968); Pak Won-s5n, “The Merchant System Peculiar to Korea,” Journal o f Social Sciences and Humanities 26 (1967): 100-113; Pak W5n-son, “Traditional Korean Commercial and Industrial Institutions and Thought,” in Introduction to Korean Studies, ed. The National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea (Seoul: The National Academy o f Sciences [Forward 1986]), 563-601; Kim Yong-sop, Choson hugi nongdpsa yon'gu. II, Nongop pyondong, nonghak sajo (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1971); Kim Yong-sop, “Absentee Landlord System During the 19-20th century in Korea,” Journal o f Social Sciences and Humanities 37 (1972): 27-63; and Kim Yong-sop, Han 'guk kundae nongdpsa yon 'gu: nongop kaehydngnon, nongop chongch ’aek (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1975). From the perspective of the minjung historiography, a similar argument was advanced by Kang Man-gil, Han ’guk sangop uiyoksa (Seoul: Sejong Taewang Kinyom Saophoe, 1975) and “Merchants of Kaesong,” in Economic Life in Korea, ed. Shin-Yong Chun (Seoul: International Cultural Foundation, 1978), 89-119. For an equally common argument that Japanese colonialism exacerbated Korean economic backwardness, see Ch’oe Ho-jin, The Economic History o f Korea: From the Earliest Times to 1945 (Seoul: The Freedom Library, 1971).

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emphasized the economically transformative, though politically oppressive, impact of Japanese imperialism on modem Korean development.12 Yet despite their differences and disagreements, scholars no longer seem to deny that Korea underwent significant changes under Japanese colonial rule. They have come to accept that these changes were not extraneous to colonialism, but the very characteristics of a modem, capitalistic form of colonial domination itself. It follows, then, that the more intrusive the colonial rule, the more sweeping the changes it must bring to the colonized society. Recent studies have begun to analyze these changes in terms of the notion of “colonial modernity.” This concept is not limited to the realms of politics and economics but applied more broadly to culture, and is also used to tease out continuities rather than ruptures between the colonial and post-colonial periods.13 This methodological shift also reflects a

12 For studies on “colonial modernization” or “colonial industrialization,” see An Pyong-jik et al., eds., Kundae Choson ui kyongje kujo (Seoul: Pibong Ch’ulp’ansa, 1989); Carter Eckert, Offspring o f Empire: The Kochang Kims and the Colonial Origins o f Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); Hori Kazuo and An Pydng-jik, “Shokumin Chosen kogyoka no rekishiteki shojoken to sono seikaku,” in Kindai Chosen kogyoka no kenkyu, ed. Nakamura Tetsu and An Pyong-jik (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha, 1993); Hori Kazuo, Chosen kogyoka no shiteki bunseki (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1995); and Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: the Onoda Cement Factory (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999). These works have challenged the conventional, Marxist interpretations that the Japanese colonial mle destroyed a budding capitalist economy and blocked the growth of a native capitalist class in Korea. For a rebuttal of this “colonial modernization” theory, see Sin Yong-ha’s theory of “deprivation” (sut ’allon) in Ilche singminji kundaehwaron pip 'an (Seoul: Munhak kwa Chisongsa, 1998). For a useful and detailed historiographical essay with a focus on labor, see SoonWon Park, “Colonial Industrial Growth and the Emergence of the Korean Working Class,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 128-160. 13 See, for instance, Kim Chin-kyun and Chong Kun-sik, eds., Kundae chuch ’e wa singminji kyuyul kwollyok (Seoul: Munhwa Kwahaksa, 1997), and Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea (1999). To Myon-hoe offers an insightful critique of the concept o f colonial modernity in his book review on Colonial Modernity in Korea in “Singmin juui ka nulaktoen ‘singminji kundaesQng’,” Yoksa Munje Yon'gu (Yoksa Munje Yon’guso) 7 (2001): 251-272. Kim Chin-s5ng, Soul e ttansuhol ul hohala (Seoul: Hyonsil Munhwa Yon’gu, 1999) emphasizes the “negative continuity” between colonial modernity and modernity in post-liberation Korea, and employs the Foucauldian concept of disciplinary power to show how it functioned in the formation of the “modem subject” in the colonial period. In the context of colonial modernity, the idea of “colonial publicness” (K. konggongsong, J. kokyosei) is explored by Yun Hae-dong in Singminji ui hoesaek chidae (Seoul: Y5ksa Pip'yongsa. 2002) and Namiki Masato in “Chosen ni okem ‘shokuminchi kindaisei,’ ‘shokuminchi kokyosei,’ tainichi kyoryoku: shokuminchi seijishi, shakaishi kenkyu no tame no yobiteki kosatsu,” Kokusai Koryu Kenkyu: Kokusai Koryu Gakubu Kiyo (Ferisu Jogakuin Daigaku) 5 (March 2003), and “Shokuminchiki Chosen ni

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broader trend in colonial studies, marked by the decline of the Marxist paradigm and an explosion of new (especially post-colonial) approaches since the end o f the Cold War. Recent works on colonialism are distinguished from the traditional historiography by their analytical emphasis on the culture and discourse of empire rather than the politics and economics of imperialism.14 Nonetheless, the orthodox approach to imperialism has not lost its efficacy. Skeptical of the continuity between colonial and post-colonial developments in Korea, Japanese and South Korean scholars continue to remind us that if Korea modernized and industrialized under Japanese rule, that process was historically specific to the colonial context and a harsh and agonizing one indeed.15 Meanwhile, an atmosphere of caution has also arisen against the tendency of recent scholarship to focus exclusively on culture while sidelining the discussion of political economy,16 and the danger of conflating capitalism and colonialism in the analysis of colonial modernity.17

okeru ‘kokyosei’ no kento,” Higashi Ajia ni okeru "koron ’’ keisei no hikakushi kenkyu (Heisei 12-14 nendo kagaku kenkyuhi hojokin (kiban kenkyu (C) (1)), kenkyu seika hokokusho, May 2003). 14 In Japan, a similar trend has given rise to an interesting division between a group of young scholars concerned with the culture and social history of empire (teikokushi), and a traditional camp of scholars focusing on the economic and empirical analysis of imperialism (teikoku shugishi). See Komagome Takeshi, “ ’Teikokushi’ kenkyu no shatei,” Nihonshi Kenkyu (Nihonshi Kenkyukai) 452 (April 2000): 224231. 15 See Kawai Kazuo and Yun Myong-hon, eds., Shokuminchiki no Chosen kogyd (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1991); Son Chae-w5n, “Shokuminchiki Chosen ni okem koyo seido,” Nihon Shokuminchi Kenkyu (Nihon Shokuminchi Kenkyukai) 10 (July 1998): 19-32; Higuchi Yuichi, Senjika Chosen no nomin seikatsushi, 1939-1945 (Tokyo: Shakai Hyoronsha, 1998); Matsumoto Takenori, Shokuminchi kenryoku to Chosen nomin (Tokyo: Shakai Hyoronsha, 1998); and Hashiya Hiroshi, Teikoku Nihon to shokuminchi toshi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2004). Also see “Kaisetsu: teikokushugi to shokuminchi,” in Yanagisawa and Okabe, Teikokushugi to shokuminchi, 11-12. 16 “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” Tensions o f Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1-37; and “Kaisetsu: teikokushugi to shokuminchi,” 12-13. 17 See To Myon-hoe, “Singmin juui ka nulaktoen ‘singminji kundaesong’.”

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These methodological issues ultimately bring us back to the fundamental question of what colonialism is. First of all, colonialism is at once an economic, political, cultural, and social phenomenon: one cannot adequately explain it without understanding its multifaceted character.18 What we need, then, is a more dynamic, multidimensional, and comprehensive analysis of empire by taking account of political economy as well as culture, the coercive structures of colonialism as well as the globalizing and hegemonic effects of modernity. Furthermore, the process of colonialism must necessarily involve the question of colonial encounter.19 Historians old and new have usually examined Japanese colonialism either from the top down, focusing on diplomacy, policy-making, or the imposition o f new economic structures, or from the bottom up, focusing on Korean nationalistic movements. But we must also look at what transpired between these two levels of activity, if we were to understand the internal dynamics of colonialism and assess the changes it wrought on the local society. In particular, Korea is unique in the history o f modem imperialism because the rise of local nationalism preceded the onset of colonial rule.20 For this reason, we need especially to understand Japanese colonialism as a process of engagement - conflict, 18 In my view, works by Peter Duus (1995) and Louise Young (1998) in particular have succeeded in this effort. 19 Colonial encounter has been studied and theorized extensively by anthropologists of colonialism, who have concerned themselves with analyzing the dynamic and dialectical processes of cultural change that result from interaction between colonizer and colonized. See for instance, Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) on evangelical missionary efforts in colonial Africa; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) on the notion of “contact zone”; and Nicholas B. Dirks, ed. Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) on various cultural domains and social dynamics of colonial encounter. 20 In the history o f twentieth-century imperialism and colonialism, rarely do we see a case in which local nationalism that germinated in the pre-modem period competes with colonialism in the modem era. In colonies in Africa and in Asia (such as Taiwan, India, and Indonesia), nationalism usually developed in response to and under the framework of colonial rule, not prior to its creation. For the rise of Korean nationalism in the late nineteenth century, see Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and John Duncan, "Proto-nationalism in Premodem Korea," in Perspectives on Korea, ed. Sang-Oak Lee and Duk-Soo Park (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1998).

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competition, and cooperation - with Korean nationalism, while at the same time disaggregating each category. We need, in short, an in-depth analysis o f the multilayered dynamics of engagement between colonizer and colonized. How did different segments of the Japanese and Koreans engage with one another? How did their various interactions shape the nature and contour of Japanese colonial rule? This study attempts to answer these questions by looking at the micro-history of Japanese settler colonists and analyzing their interactions with the Koreans on the ground.

Japanese Settlers in Korea The Japanese settlers in Korea formed one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century. Settlers provide the key to understanding Japan’s colonial project for a number of reasons. First, the sheer number of settlers, totaling about a million by the end of the colonial period, suggests that their presence complicated the form and process of colonial domination in manifold ways, which merit detailed attention and analysis. Second, their penetration into a land densely inhabited by people with shared cultural and racial traits signifies an intensity and complexity of colonial encounter not found in other colonies in the empire, and indeed, with few exceptions, not found anywhere in the twentieth-century colonial world. Third, settlers supported the lifeline of Japan’s nascent empire and sustained its modernizing effort at home by facilitating the penetration of Japanese capital into Korea, when large metropolitan firms remained reluctant to invest in the peninsula. In short, the study o f settlers enables us to re-think the formation, impact, and internal dynamics of Japanese colonialism from a novel vantage point, “from within.” The significance of settlers is not limited to the colonial context, however: it also projects back into the metropole. The importance of seeing Japan through the lens of Korea has been a major concern among the Japanese scholars of Korea, while analyzing the impact

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of the colony on the metropole has become a main agenda in recent colonial studies. By­ products of Japan’s domestic modernization and agents of its overseas colonization, the settlers as migrants and colonists were inextricably tied to the metropole as much as to the colony. We see in their actions and aspirations how the violent impact of the Meiji revolution extended to the colonial periphery and, in many cases, transformed ordinary and often hard-pressed Japanese into even more cruel oppressors overseas. The history and legacy o f settlers indeed bespeak the need to re-conceptualize the space in which Japan modernized itself: settlers provide a unique lens through which to refract diverse paths to modernity trodden by the Japanese, from the Meiji period to the present. In sum, settlers embodied crucial links between Japan’s nation-building and empirebuilding. As grass-roots mediators of the two processes, settlers provide the key to understanding the relationship between the production o f national power and colonial power in the rise of modem Japan. And yet, scholars have only begun to treat settlers as the object of serious scholarly inquiry. A systematic study of former Japanese residents of Korea was first proposed by an eminent historian of Korea, Kajimura Hideki. In a series of articles written in the 1970s, Kajimura stressed the need to look at ordinary settlers and analyze the Japanese colonization of Korea “from below” as part and parcel of the social history of common Japanese people.21 Although time did not allow Kajimura to complete this task, the pioneering works by Kimura Kenji (1989) and Peter Duus (1995) have since offered the first vivid portraits of the pre-annexation Japanese community in Korea.22 More recently, Takasaki Soji (2002) has made an ambitious attempt to survey the history of settlers, from the 21 Kajimura Hideki, “Shokuminchi to Nihonjin,” in Chosenshi to Nihonjin, Kajimura Hideki chosakushu 1 (1974; repr., Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1992), 193-4. 22 Kimura Kenji, Zaicho Nihonjin no shakaishi (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1989); and Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword.

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opening of the port of Pusan in 1876 to the end of the colonial period and beyond. Unfortunately his narrative, aimed at a general audience, amounts to no more than a chronology, or indeed an expose, o f events, individuals, and their exploitative deeds. All Japanese in Korea, regardless of occupation, class, gender, motive, and time period, are rendered as a fixed and homogenous entity of “grassroots invaders,” thereby reinforcing rather than rethinking the dichotomized view of oppressor and oppressed.23 I apply a more rigorous analytical agenda to the study o f settler power. More than just a record of colonial oppression, my analysis of settlers is an attempt to identify various agents and motivations under the enduring structure of domination, and to probe the complexities and unpredictable outcomes of engagement between ruler and ruled that cannot be reduced to a simple dialectic o f coercion and resistance 24 This requires moving beyond the binary paradigm of Japanese aggression versus Korean defiance or submission, and searching instead for multiple levels of interaction among settlers, Koreans, and colonial officials; understanding tension and contradictions between the settlers’ identity as agents of empire and the plurality of the Japanese expatriate community; identifying horizontal connections among settlers in addition to hierarchical ones between officials and civilians; unearthing the process and mechanism by which settler consciousness is produced and reproduced at both material and discursive levels; and incorporating oral testimonies in the analysis of settler power to understand its impact beyond the demise of empire in 1945. All 23 See Jun Uchida’s review of Takasaki’s work in Kankoku Chosen no bunka to shakai (Kankoku Chosen Bunka Kenkyukai), vol. 2 (October 2003): 278-286. 24 My methodology has been particularly influenced by collaborative works among historians and anthropologists, such as Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions o f Empire (1997). They have stressed the importance of analyzing the divisions within the colonizers and how they produced new tensions and alliances that blurred the dichotomies between colonizer and colonized. In Korean studies, Shin and Robinson’s Colonial modernity in Korea has also proposed a more interactive approach to the study of Japanese empire by treating colonialism, modernity, and nationalism as three mutually interactive frames, in place of a homogenized view of Japanese colonialism.

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of these agendas form the problem consciousness (mondai ishiki) o f my study of the Japanese settler activities in Korea or what I call Japanese settler colonialism.

Japanese Settler Colonialism Settler colonialism is a term that has conventionally been applied to the British white dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, or the colonial states in Africa where settlers dominated, such as Kenya, South Rhodesia, Algeria, Tunisia, and South Africa.25 The former group operated according to its inner logic as self-governing states within the British crown, but many fruitful comparisons can be made by placing Korea in the latter set of settler colonial states. For example, Japanese in Korea (and in Taiwan) had much in common with pieds-noirs in French Algeria or European settlers in Tunisia in terms o f their numbers, occupational structure, and patterns of migration and settlement.26 Their geographical

25 Studies on the European settler activities in colonial Africa include Paul Mosley, The Settler Economies: Studies in the Economic History o f Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1963 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Dane Kennedy, The Islands o f White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987); David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bone, 1870-1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Jean and John Comaroff, O f Revelation and Revolution, On the British migration and settlement in the white dominions, see Stephen Constantine, Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions Between the Wars (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990). For a history of anthropology and its relationship to the development of Australian settler colonialism, see Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation o f Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics o f an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 1999). For studies on white settler colonies from the perspective of ecological history, see Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, eds., Ecology and Empire: Environmental History o f Settler Societies (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997); and Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English diaspora: environment and history in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Cambridge, U.K.; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1999). An ambitious comparative study o f six settler economies of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay is Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics o f Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Discussions of various settler societies and their interactions with the indigeneous groups include Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations o f Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London: Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995); and Lynette Russell, ed., Colonial frontiers: Indigenous-European encounters in settler societies (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2001). 26 For useful books on the French colonial empires in Africa, see Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism, 1871-1914: Myths and Realities (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966); Patrick Manning, Francophone SubSaharan Africa, 1880-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Prochaska, Making Algeria French', and Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea o f Empire in France and West

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proximity to the home country also fostered a degree o f integration to the metropole at economic, political, legal and cultural levels that were not seen in more distant overseas colonies. Upon close scrutiny, however, differences between the Japanese and European settler colonial states seem more compelling. In colonial Africa, the size and scale of white settlement had little to do with settler power. It was defined first and foremost by control over land, and the resource base of these states “depended on the settler economy.”27 By contrast, Japanese settlers’ activities, mostly in commerce and service, occupied a very small part in the revenue structure of Korea, and fiscal sources in the metropole, largely bureaucratic investment, accounted for the bulk of capital formation in Korea. Although many lived off the land tilled by Korean tenant farmers, Japanese settlers never completely moved the native inhabitants off their land, in the manner that the white colonists did in the highlands of Kenya and in the colony of South Rhodesia, for instance. Furthermore, through the system of local representative councils European settlers could exert political pressure more successfully than their Japanese counterparts. By the 1920s the European settlers in Algeria filled the bulk of colonial bureaucracy and the colons later became an important element in the breakdown of the Fourth Republic in France, while the British in South Rhodesia even declared independence from the metropolitan state in 1923. The Japanese settlers, on the other hand, to the end lacked the representative or legislative councils through which to bring their interests to bear on the colonial and metropolitan authorities. Although Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Two useful volumes on the general history of colonial Africa are J. D. Fage and Roland Oliber, eds., The Cambridge History o f Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), vol. 6 (1985), vol. 7 (1986), and vol. 8 (1984); and L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, eds., Colonialism in Africa, 1870-1960, 5 volumes (London: Cambridge University Press, 19691975). 27 Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 102.

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they were granted some legislative power in the 1930s, they never sought or gained the same degree of control over the institutions of the colonial state as had their European counterparts in Africa. Bearing in mind these similarities and differences, the following appear to be the essential features o f Japanese settler power in Korea. First of all, despite the settlers’ numbers, Japanese settler power was dependent, even parasitic, on the colonial state. Settlers could not wield much power without the hegemonic structure of Japanese mle, though they were not completely subsumed by it. The state was the major, and often the only, source of protection, privilege and patronage in colonial Korea, where the predominance of bureaucrats was a constant feature of everyday life. Settler power was also shaped and conditioned by the activities of the colonized. If the Japanese colonists intruded upon the local society in violent and exploitative ways, their activities did not go unchallenged by traditional social structures, resilient local commercial networks, and other enduring aspects of local culture. As a colonial minority vastly outnumbered by the local population, settler livelihoods could also be directly threatened by Korean resistance, which in turn compelled the Japanese to seek native collaborators and deepened settler dependence on the state. The strength of Korean nationalism shaped settler consciousness as well. Settlers developed a besieged mentality and constantly feared the Other, which led to their highhandedness, racism, and occasional violence toward the Korean people that often surpassed that of the officials. In this sense, the Japanese settler psychology was not dissimilar to that of their European counterparts in Kenya and South Rhodesia (and elsewhere), where settler power was “matched by fear, arrogance by anxiety, disdain by suspicion.”28

28 Dane Kennedy, The Islands o f White, 187.

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Far from seeking independence from the metropole as these British settlers did, however, the Japanese settlers desired to bind Korea more closely to the home country by embracing the policy o f naichi encho (extension of the homeland). Their consciousness was metropolitan-oriented, much like that of the colons in French Algeria. And yet, Japanese settler action and attitudes betrayed constant tension with the official policy of assimilation, which aimed to graft Japan’s recent experience in domestic modernization onto its colonial peripheries in line with the idea of naichi encho. Although settlers as citizens of “a first-class nation” were vested with a duty to raise “the cultural level” (mindo) o f the Koreans, they fundamentally loathed the idea of assimilation. Because it threatened to impinge on their privileged status, the settlers vehemently opposed any policy measures that dared to narrow a gap between the two peoples, let alone treat them on the same administrative level. Where cultural and racial affinities characterized the relationship between colonizer and colonized as understood by the Japanese state, maintaining difference was settlers’ foremost agenda: it was a source of settler power, their very raison d ’etre. Settler power also worked in contradictory ways as a conduit o f modernity. Settlers played a part in the diffusion of bourgeois cultural values and beliefs in modernity by selling imported Western goods, spreading modem knowledge and technology, and influencing the Korean life habits in many indirect ways. At the same time, however, the presence of settlers could restrict the flow of these products of modernity, which tended to concentrate in Japanese settlements and neighborhoods, thereby generating a sense of alienation and frustration among the Korean residents.29 Hence, settler power was inherently contradictory.

29 See Kim Chin-song, Soul e ttansuhol ul hohala. Modem infrastructural developments and public facilities also tended to concentrate in Japanese neighborhoods.

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Such antinomy of settler power was, however, not antithetical to official colonial rule based on assimilation policy, but in fact coterminous to it. The colonial administration revealed its own Janus-faced character o f urging the Koreans on a path o f assimilation with “modernized” Japan on the one hand, and restraining that very process to maintain Japanese hegemony on the other. While touting the rhetoric of assimilation, the colonial government for the most part allowed only limited rights and opportunities for Koreans in education, industry, bureaucratic appointment, and participation in local government—the fiction of assimilation masked the reality o f gross social inequalities and power disparities between colonizer and colonized. Settlers, then, bore the brunt as well as the contradiction of Japanese colonial policy itself. My definition of settler colonialism is based on these particular and internally conflicting characteristics o f Japanese settlers in Korea, all of which, in my view, fundamentally stemmed from their ontological condition of being neither completely “the ruler” nor “the ruled”—or what may be characterized as the hybridity30 o f settler power. Rather than serving at the bidding of the colonial state, settlers occupied a more ambivalent and contested space on the colonial periphery as at once the objects and the subjects of

30 As one of the central concerns of post-colonial writing, hybridity is particularly relevant to the analysis of settler colonialism, for it occurs most prominently in post-colonial societies where settler colonists have violently reshaped the local structures and life ways by forcing the indigenous people to assimilate to the dominant culture. Hybridity, however, does not mean total disappearance of independent cultures, but rather continual cross-fertilization between new and older forms of cultures and social practices. This concept has also been adopted by theories on colonial societies. Most influential is Homi Bhabha’s usage of hybridity in his theorization of colonial discourse in India. Defining colonial space as a site where the constitutive elements of imperial culture and indigenous culture interact in complex ways, he explains how such interactions give rise to the multiplicity o f colonial culture by using the concepts of “hybridity” and “mimicry.” In The Location o f Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), Bhabha’s analysis of “mimicry” effectively illustrates the fear and anxiety of the British colonizers toward the Anglicized Indian elites who threaten to obliterate to a certain degree, though not completely, the difference between the Self and the Other. In my study, I use the concept of hybridity slightly differently. My own definition of hybridity refers to the ambivalent positionality of civilian colonists, and emphasizes the mutuality o f the process of hybridization between the colonizer and the colonized. In particular, I pay attention to the settler fear of becoming Koreanized even as they were trying to Japanize the Koreans in analyzing the cultural dynamics of interaction between Japanese and Koreans.

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Govemor-General’s rule. Indeed, diverse and competing interests o f settlers did not always mesh well with administrative concerns of the colonial officials, and settlers’ activities often ran afoul of the colonial government’s policy goals. To be sure, as colonial rule deepened, settlers found it increasingly difficult to operate outside the hegemonic framework of Govemor-General’s rule. Nonetheless, settlers could also threaten and limit its operations from within by asserting their own ideology (by rejecting assimilation policy, for instance) or by injecting violence on a daily level that contradicted the official effort at appeasing the Koreans. Such a paradox of dependence and tension characterized the relationship of settler power to official colonial rule. I deploy the analytical framework of settler colonialism to show how Japanese settlers, like their European counterparts, possessed their own power, ideology and culture. By teasing out a settler mode of domination that was quite distinct, though not wholly independent, from the official ruling apparatus, I want to examine and explain the multiplicity of colonial power or the “multi-layered hegemony” o f colonialism.31 Less institutionalized than most of the European variants, Japanese settler colonialism refers to a form of domination that operated through both formal and informal channels, including interpersonal networks, and mediums as diverse as the market, local politics, the press, social work, and everyday life practices. To illustrate the processes and mechanisms of Japanese settler colonialism in economic, political, discursive, social, and cultural realms, this study focuses on the activities of settler leaders or “pioneers” whom I call the brokers of empire.

31 See Yun Hae-dong, Singminji ui hoesaek chidae (2002).

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Brokers o f Empire The Japanese settlers in Korea were a mixed bag. Before the establishment of a protectorate in 1905 brought a host of bureaucrats, army officers, technicians, and other middle-class elements, the early Japanese who operated in Korea were largely ordinary and low-class Japanese or carpetbaggers, who were lured into the peninsula by the “pull” of economic opportunities and much inflated hope for ikkaku senkin or quick money and easy success. Mixed among these profit- and fortune-seekers were also some Japanese who held grander visions of reform for Korea: journalists infused with the sprit of the people’s rights movement; teachers with a mission to spread the knowledge of Japanese among Koreans; religious leaders armed with Buddhist texts; and continental adventures (ronin) or soshi seeking a role in the turbulent Korean court politics. The nascent Japanese empire fed on these diverse interests and passions of anonymous Japanese, who ventured into the peninsula before the flag and pursued their own agendas, often at odds with one another and in contradiction to the designs of the Meiji government. My account focuses on those enterprising settlers who established themselves as locally influential civilians in the pre-annexation period and led the resident Japanese community through the late 1930s. I conceptualize the role and activities of this first generation o f settler leaders - prominent “localized” merchants and entrepreneurs, some journalists, and a few ronin or political fixers - as brokers of empire. By brokers of empire, I refer to non-state actors who settled in Korea before or immediately after the establishment of the Korean Government-General in 1910, and not only served as representatives of the settler community but also actively mediated the colonial management of Korea as its grassroots movers and shakers.

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The concept of brokers is useful in examining settler colonialism as process in several important ways. At the most abstract level, the term “brokers” resonates with the profitoriented mentality that guided settler activities, from daily commercial endeavors to more large-scale petition movements. But the idea of brokers encompasses more complex layers of meaning. First of all, I employ the concept to elucidate the dynamic and internally contested ways in which the settlers mediated Japan’s relationship to its colonial project. The brokers of empire bolstered the colonial policy o f assimilation, but often as a means of lobbying for their demands vis-a-vis the authorities or negotiating their distance from Koreans to safeguard their privileged status. The idea o f brokers also highlights the settlers’ efforts at expanding their leverage and institutionalizing their power, precisely because of the lack of meaningful legislative organs to codify their interests into policy as mentioned earlier. The brokers o f empire found multiple ways to bring their interests to bear on the ruling authorities not only by using formal or semi-official institutions such as chambers of commerce, city councils and the like, but also by devising entirely new organizations and strategies on their own. By characterizing their activities as brokers of empire, moreover, I unpack how politically ambitious settlers made frequent interventions into the hegemonic yet unstable structure of colonial governance, often behind the scenes and at the grassroots level. The brokers of empire aggressively sought to shape the course of empire as political fixers in the late Choson period, and joined the bureaucrats in rebuilding and managing the colonial enterprise as junior partners or informal advisors during the period of “cultural rule,” as we shall see. Finally and most importantly, I deploy the concept of brokers to show, as Albert Memmi has once written, how settler power and indeed colonialism itself were shaped in

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engagement as well as contestation with the actions of the “colonized.”32 Key to the operation of the brokers of empire was collaboration with the local elite. To effectively pursue their interests and expand their leverage over policy-makers, settler leaders sought connections and closely worked with a variety o f influential Koreans - aristocrats, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, landlords, religious leaders, and “pro-Japanese” elements - who shared similar, though not identical, stakes and class interests in the colonial project. Elucidating their interaction occupies the heart o f my analysis. In particular, I explore the limits and possibilities of the brokers of empire in mediating the power relations among settlers, Koreans, and colonial officials, and demonstrate the contingent dynamics of their engagement and political bargaining. The brokers of empire held no single vision of empire. Yet their lives and destinies closely intertwined with one another and with the evolution of the Japanese colonial empire as a whole. They worked together to expand settler interests and privileges, while competing with one another for leadership and influence over the ruling authorities. They held onto one another in times of crisis, while clashing over strategies for countering Korean nationalism. They shared ambivalence about assimilation with Koreans, while disagreeing widely over its precise meaning. These disparate agendas and political visions made up the internal dynamics of settler colonialism. By re-examining Japan’s colonial project from the novel vantage point of settler colonialism, this study ultimately aims to explain two broad and related points. First, it attempts to explain the multilayered dynamics of Japanese colonial power by illustrating the existence of various and interconnected spaces in which power flowed in different ways, and 32 Albert Memmi in his The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (New York: Orion Press, 1965) explained how the colonizer and the colonized were mutually shaped by each other: “The colonial relationship ... chained the colonizer and the colonized into an implacable dependence, molded their respective characters, and dictated their conduct." (Ix).

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which together sustained the structure o f colonial hegemony. Settler colonialism serves as a prism through which to refract the diverse and often contradictory ways - hegemonic and hesitant, coercive and persuasive, collaborative and discriminatory - in which the Japanese engaged with the Koreans. Settler power also had many faces: it manifested itself in the forms of economic and political dominance, social control, discursive practices, and ideological manipulation. Second, this study seeks to explain how imperialism intertwined with the process of modernity to shape the character of Japan’s colonial project o f assimilation that was intense yet fragile.33 I view this uneasy juxtaposition as a product o f Japan’s simultaneous emergence as a modem state and an empire in the early twentieth century on the one hand, and as a result of engagement with local Korean nationalism on the other. Settler colonialism, as an interface of the two processes, as a conduit of modernity and colonialism, embodied and intensified this duality of Japanese colonial power. Both the self-confidence of a rapidly modernizing nation-state and the anxiety o f a fledgling empire in face o f strong local nationalism were mirrored and magnified in the settler activities and consciousness. Put differently, the brokers of empire served to deepen colonial power and modernity as well as their inner contradictions. We can enrich our understanding of the internally complex nature of Japan’s modernity, I argue, by examining the internally contested ways in which the settlers sought to mediate Japan’s production of power and colonial power on the fringe of empire.

33 Modem colonial empires that were short-lived, intense, and deep in impact include the Japanese empires in Korea and Taiwan, and the German empires in South West and East Africa and Papua New Guinea (and arguably the twentieth-century versions of the French and British empires in Africa as well). Within this set of empires, Japan stands at one end of the distribution in terms of its thoroughgoing effort to assimilate and “Japanize” the colonial populations.

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Sources, Methods, and Organization In the pages that follow, I recast the story of Japanese colonialism in Korea with civilian settlers, instead of officials, as its protagonists. This focus on non-governmental actors has led my research beyond the official colonial documents housed at key archives in Japan and Korea, into private materials and memories of former settlers. I use government reports, surveys, and papers of the Govemment-Generals, not only to analyze the colonial policy-making, but also to look beneath the “imperial mind” for various local players and partners in the management of Korean industrial development, the suppression of Korean nationalist activities, and the promotion of assimilation policy. I supplement these sources by incorporating transcribed interviews of former colonial bureaucrats as well as oral interviews and written questionnaires I conducted with former Japanese residents o f Korea. To trace diverse agendas and aspirations of settlers, I also read memoirs, biographies, gazetteers, magazine articles, and various local Japanese publications on Korea. The core of this study explores various interactions between Japanese and Koreans, as they are documented in Japanese as well as Korean-language newspapers and magazines, company histories, chambers of commerce reports, proceedings of local council meetings, and secret local police reports and other classified materials which chronicle previously unknown details and activities of “pro-Japanese” organizations. In analyzing such a wide range of sources, I adopt an interdisciplinary as well as an interactive approach to colonial history. My interdisciplinary approach combines analytical tools of socio-economic history, anthropology, textual analysis, and the comparative study of empires. Using an interactive approach, I also treat colonial culture, political economy, and modernity as three interlocking frames within a single analytic field. My analysis of the cultural dynamics of colonial society incorporates the anthropologists’ emphasis on the use of

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oral testimonies, as well as the importance of local contexts and indigenous resistance in understanding the complex divisions and contingent forces within the colonial community. In examining the political economy of empire and its relationship to modernity, I look at the socio-economic history of Japanese migration and settlement, which provides as much insight about Japan’s imperial projects as about the internal contradictions of Japan’s capitalist modernization. I also draw upon the methods of textual analysis in order to understand the production of modernity and the settler mentalities, and more importantly to highlight conflicting interests and anxieties of colonizers in order to understand limits of colonial authority. In combining these tools in my overall approach, I have learned from the collaborative efforts of historians and anthropologists, such as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler’s work (1997),34 to probe the relationship of the colonial state to the metropolitan state, and to explore a more dynamic link between political economy and the culture of empire and modernity. Based on such a synthesis of traditional and recent methodological agendas in colonial studies, this book investigates the role of the brokers o f empire in three distinct phases of colonial encounter. Beginning with the history of Japanese migration to Korea in the late nineteenth century, Part I (Chapters Two and Three) traces the emergence of the brokers of empire, placing it within the Korean context as a vortex o f empires as well as within the Japanese context of rapid modernization. I look at both contexts to explain how and why ordinary Japanese were transformed from “subalterns” o f Japan’s capitalistic modernization into agents of foreign domination. I emphasize the fledgling character of Japan’s initial expansion into Korea, which allowed various non-governmental actors to intervene in its process at the grassroots level. The consolidation of Japan’s political control 34 Cooper and Stoler, Tensions o f Empire.

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over Korea, however, diminished settlers’ autonomy, bringing settlers and Koreans under the uniform administrative authority of the Governor-General. In the rest o f this work, I show how the brokers o f empire endeavored to protect and promote settler interests by operating betwixt and between the administrative demands o f the colonial government and the recalcitrant Korean society. Focusing on the period of Governor-General Saito Makoto’s “cultural rule” in the 1920s, Part II (Chapters Four through Seven) examines the brokers o f empire in action. Starting with the rupture of the March First Movement of 1919, a sudden outburst of Korean nationalism, these chapters map anxieties and aspirations of settler leaders in remaking the colonial enterprise and expanding their leverage over colonial officials, when the fledgling imperial power found itself on the defensive. The brokers of empire sought to mold their interests into policy by co-opting Korean bourgeois elites in three key lobbying movements that extended to the metropole: developing Korean industry, promoting assimilation (naisen yuwa), and obtaining suffrage in Korea. Underlying these economic, cultural, and political projects were not only settler desire for self-empowerment, but also mutual fear about the Korean nationalists and shared visions of modernity that brought settlers, Korean elites, and colonial officials into a new relationship of interdependence—a dynamic that complicated the binary between colonizer and colonized. And yet, I argue that such partnership, in the face of the mounting pressure of Korean nationalism, unwittingly exposed settler ambivalence about assimilation policy, conflicting ethnic agendas between Japanese and Korean elites, and deep mistrust of the colonial authorities, rendering their collaboration increasingly unstable and internally contested over time. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria sets the context for Part III (Chapters Eight and Nine), which examines the brokers of empire as organs of the state in the 1930s. It attempts to explain how Manchuria, as the new focus of Japanese imperialism, fundamentally changed 26

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the social dynamics of engagement between Japanese and Koreans. In my explanation I pay attention to how the settlers, in cooperation and competition with the Korean elites, aggressively pursued new opportunities afforded by the Manchurian trade and the policy of colonial industrialization. I also discuss how the two groups sought greater leverage and legitimacy as representatives of local residents through the new system of local government, social work, and various programs for the promotion of local commerce and industry. The more they sought to expand their sphere of public activity, paradoxically, the more they became enmeshed in the hegemonic structure o f the colonial state. I argue that greater cooperation and interpenetration o f state and society in the promotion of local economy and social management transformed the brokers of empire and their Korean allies into semi­ official organs of the colonial regime, and ultimately laid the basis for the wartime mobilization and “imperialization” of Korea. By highlighting crucial, and largely overlooked, sites of colonial engagement with Koreans, this study describes the efforts of civilian settler leaders to mediate the colonial management of Korea in its various interstices. Through a micro-history o f settlers, furthermore, my study seeks to re-think the process of Japan’s colonization of Korea as well as to re-conceptualize the space in which Japan modernized. As the first comprehensive study of Japanese settlers in colonial Korea, my work contributes to the diverse trends of scholarship in Japan, South Korea and North America by using hitherto untapped sources located in these countries, and by examining settler colonialism, Korean nationalism, and Japanese modernity as mutually constitutive processes. Beyond the study of Japanese colonialism, my study will contribute to the interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism by exploring the analytical framework of settler colonialism as a novel way o f integrating the Japanese empire, largely omitted from the Western historiography on imperialism, into comparative studies of empires. 27

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CHAPTER 2: The Japanese Penetration into Korea, 1876-1910 Nationalistic and Marxist narratives on Japanese imperialism have linked the early expansionist impulses of the Meiji state to the formal colonial rule of the Govemor-Generals, perhaps too neatly.1From their works emerges a linear genealogy o f Japan’s aggressive designs, first harbored by the late-nineteenth bakumatsu authorities, articulated during the sei-Kan ron (“Plan for an expedition against Korea”) in the 1870s, and finally realized by the annexation of Korea in 1910 as if there had been a grand plan all along. However, the process of empire-building was neither smooth nor uniform for the fledgling Japanese state. First of all, Korea was “a vortex of empires” before Japan established its political stranglehold over the peninsula. The efforts by foreign powers to pry open the "hermit kingdom" to trade began with the French expedition of 1866 and the American expedition of 1871. To join in this “free trade imperialism,” Japan followed by imposing the Kanghwa Treaty, a Japanese version of the “unequal treaties,” on Korea, finally opening its ports to trade in 1876. But it was China, Korea’s traditional overlord, which provided the denouement to the process of ferreting Korea out of its isolationism. Having engineered a host of Korea’s modem treaties with Western powers in 1882, China aided Korea’s modernizing effort under the Min leadership, while keeping Korea’s foreign policy under its control. From the outset, however, Korea’s self-strengthening program was beset by factionalism, pitting the “pragmatic” Min faction against the “idealistic” enlightenment faction. Such internal bickering increased Korea’s dependence on China, who was fast shedding its traditional policy of non-interference and donning the new garb of Westem-style

1Both the traditional Marxist Japanese scholarship and the nationalistic historiography in Korea have maintained that the Japanese schemed to expand and subjugate Korea well before annexation or, as some even claim, since the Hideyoshi’s invasions in the sixteenth century. See note 7 above.

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imperialist.2 By the time of the Convention of Tientsin in 1885— a bilateral agreement reached between China and Japan which underwrote Chinese dominance in the peninsula for the next decade—Korea had become completely excluded from the process of negotiating its future course of reform and foreign policy.3 In addition to battling the influence of Qing China, Meiji Japan had to deal with its own “backwardness” vis-a-vis the West. Japan began to expand overseas, just as it had laid the foundation for building a “rich and strong country” (fukoku kyohei) at home. It is not hard to imagine that Japan itself had narrowly escaped the fate of being colonized by the Western powers, whose competition led to a more aggressive and preemptive form o f expansionism, or “new imperialism” that brought a wave of annexations in Africa and Asia in the 1870s and the 1880s.4 In the face of growing Western encroachments on East Asia, Japan was preoccupied with the preservation of national sovereignty and the acquisition of international status. Rather than a long-term design to colonize Korea, a sense of paranoia about maintaining national security and a desire to achieve parity with the West propelled Japan’s early penetration into the peninsula. In a world already dominated by European imperialists, Korea was also the only place where the Meiji leaders felt Japan could adequately compete with the West. When Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War o f 1894-95 and gained Taiwan as its first colony, Japan was also still on its way to becoming a fully industrialized nation.

2 Kim Kyu Hyuk, The Last Phase o f the East Asian World Order, chap. 8. 3 Martina Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen and Barbarian Envoys: The Opening o f Korea, 1875-1885 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1977), 223-225. 4 For a comprehensive summary of theories on “new imperialism,” see Harrison M. Wright, ed., The ‘New Imperialism Analysis o f Late Nineteenth-Century Expansion, 2nd ed. (Lexington, Massachusetts and Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1976).

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Up until the time of World War I, in fact, Japan heavily relied on Western-imported technology and capital for its national and imperial construction. Lacking technological expertise, Japan continued to import an array o f industrial products and machinery from the West, from steel and pig iron, to small arms, steamships, and railroad engines. Japan scored victories against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 with warships built in British and European shipyards. Because large-scale capitalists at home showed little interest in investing in overseas colonies, the Meiji leaders were also compelled to borrow heavily, albeit reluctantly, from the West, to finance the construction of the empire, including the costs of the Russo-Japanese War, two major state-funded enterprises—the South Manchurian Railway Company and the Oriental Development Company—and railway construction in Korea.5 The relative material backwardness of Japan made empire-building a cautious enterprise. Fear of provoking foreign powers, combined with insufficient growth of Japanese capitalism, prevented the Tokyo leadership from pushing Japan’s economic interests in Korea too aggressively—a lesson learned from the Triple Intervention of 1895. Empire-building was also shaped and conditioned by developments on the periphery. Japan expanded into Korea according to a series o f contingent decisions made within an environment of fleeting opportunities and political intrigue at the Korean court, which was “using the barbarians against barbarians” to keep them at bay.6 If there was any fixity of purpose behind Meiji imperialism, it was a mimetic sense of a “civilizing mission” to reform Korea based on its post-Restoration experience. As Peter

5 Japan lagged most in military technology, especially naval construction. Duus, The Abacus, 246-247, 428429. 6 Ibid., 131.

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Duus has shown, however, the process of pursuing this goal was fractured by internal disagreements among policy-makers and marked by shifting techniques of domination as well as failed experiments. Empire-building was also multi-sited: it was driven by “a complex coalition uniting the Meiji leaders, backed and prodded by a chorus of domestic politicians, journalists, businessmen, and military leaders, with a subimperialist Japanese community in Korea."7 In this imperialist coalition, Japanese migrants and settlers played a particularly crucial role in driving the imperial project on the ground. Contrary to its Western counterparts, Japan’s early expansion was largely devoid of capitalists, whose energy was focused on modernizing their own country. Rather, it was propelled by interests and aspirations of ordinary and often low-class men and women who ventured into the peninsula with little capital or none at all. Early settlers who came to Korea in the 1870s and the 1880s were mostly commoners whose lives had been disrupted, overturned, and in the some cases, shattered by the revolutionary changes wrought by the Meiji imperial government. After the Kanghwa Treaty of 1876, a cross-section of Japanese, including petty merchants, sojourners, impoverished farmers, prostitutes, and carpetbaggers, flocked to the treaty ports of Pusan and In’chon, seeking to recover their losses overseas. Along with these by-products of Japan’s capitalistic modernization also came journalists, politicians, and continental adventurers or ronin—products of Japan’s new political culture who embraced the spirit of Meiji reform and pursued grander visions of empire.

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Ibid., 29. Duus argues that until around 1900, there was a consensus among the Japanese officials on the twin goals o f reform and independence for Korea, although there was also doubt about the ability of Koreans in accomplishing them by themselves. Ibid., 73.

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How did ordinary Japanese project their self-striving (risshin shusse) ambitions overseas? How do we situate the history of common Japanese people (shomin) in the broader trajectory of Japan’s imperialism in Korea? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by examining the activities of early Japanese migrants and settlers and how they intertwined with the efforts of the Japanese state to expand its political control over Korea. It was this synergy between civilian and state initiatives that drove Japan’s empire-building forward, and empowered some individuals to become influential brokers of empire.

The Early Japanese Migration and Settlement The Japanese migration to Korea began with the opening of the port of Pusan in 1876, after the Meiji government forced Korea to open its doors to trade, in a manner similar to Perry’s opening of Japan two decades earlier.8 The earliest Japanese to settle in Korea were a mixed-bag of sojourners, petty merchants, peddlers, laborers, artisans, maids, prostitutes, and a few continental ronin (adventure-seekers). Simply put, they were “carpetbaggers” who were lured into Korea by prospects of quick and easy profit (ikkaku senkin), with little thought of putting down roots in Korean soil. Few migrated under state auspices, and fewer, if any, would have linked their activity with national purpose. The poorest among them had lost their properties and fled their home villages in search of a better life in a foreign land. Some came to Korea simply to make a living as day laborers or sojourners during the agricultural off-season.9 Apart from these bankrupt merchants and impoverished farmers, many aspiring youth followed their ambitions for self-advancement and dreams of fortune in 8 Korea was the most popular destination in the Meiji period, except for those years when the Japanese migrated in greater numbers to Hawaii and to the United States in 1893, 1899, and 1900. See Kimura Kenji, “Kindai Nihon no imin, sholcumin katsudo to chukanso,” in Yanagisawa and Okabe, Teikokushugi to shokuminchi, 169. 9 Kajimura, “Shokuminchi to Nihonjin,” in Chosenshi to Nihonjin, 201.

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Korea, lured by “success stories” of overseas pioneers featured in numerous guidebooks at the time.10 There were also former samurai or shizoku (a title granted to those who formerly held samurai class status), including those from the Satsuma domain who turned to overseas commerce or adventure after losing their last-ditch battle against the Meiji government in the Seinan War of 1877.11 Scholars have offered various explanations for Japanese overseas migration. Japanese scholars have emphasized such “push” factors as impoverishment and declining economic opportunities at home and explained overseas migration as part and parcel of Japan’s capitalistic development. However, the Japanese economy during the peak years of migration between 1894 and 1910 was doing rather well, and “pull” factors, especially new opportunities for employment in Korea, appeared to be more significant in the Japanese migration to Korea.12 More micro-level studies are necessary to explore the causal link between migration and modernization, but available data imply that it was probably a combination of both factors.13 The lives of early Japanese settlers and sojourners were just as hard and unstable as they had been at home, and many failed and returned home empty-handed. Those who stayed put eked out their living by trying one odd job after another without having a steady career,

10 Kimura Kenji, “Settling into Korea: The Japanese Expansion into Korea from the Russo-Japanese War to the Early Period of Annexation,” in “Japanese Settler Colonialism and Capitalism in Japan: Advancing into Korea, Settling Down, and Returning to Japan, 1905-1950,” Occasional Papers in Japanese Studies (Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University), no. 2002-03 (June 2002), 22. 11 They constituted about 14% o f the migrants in 1903, indicating that many shizoku sought new and better lives overseas. Song Yon-ok, “Henkyo e no josei jinko ido: teikoku kara shokuminchi Chosen e,” in Henkyo no mainoriti: shosu gurupu no ikikata, ed. Teratani Hiromi et al. (Tokyo: Eihosha, 2002), 69. 12 Duus, The Abacus, 312-314. 13 The only case study is Kimura Kenji’s research on Marifu Village in Yamaguchi Prefecture. See Kimura Kenji, Zaicho Nihonjin, 30-66.

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and lived no less poorly than the Korean inhabitants. As one settler merchant, Hiroe Sawajiro, later recalled, the Japanese settlement at the foot of the Namsan was “a nest of beggars.”14 The lowly lifestyle o f Japanese settlers and sojourners also invited the considerable contempt of local Korean residents. They found the Japanese appearance and demeanor vulgar, and often juxtaposed the image o f Japanese as “dwarf barbarians” to that o f Chinese as “bearers of civilization.”15 The Japanese consulate even had to make punishable by law such “uncivilized” Japanese customs as public nudity.16 A motley crew o f these lowly and often unruly migrants continued to flood into port cities, to the disappointment of the Tokyo government which had hoped to export a band of hardworking agricultural colonists to the peninsula. At the outset, Japanese migrants were venturing into a territory that was already heavily populated by the indigenous population, leaving little vacant arable land to these newcomers who commonly turned to trade and commerce as a result. For most of the colonial period, merchants formed the single largest category, accounting for about a third of the total Japanese population in Korea.17 Settlers were engaged in a variety of trades, but they most typically sold sundry goods, manufactured in Japan, at small retail stores and catered to a limited local market. They shipped back to the metropole gold and various grains especially rice, which Koreans traded, often at an

14 A stenographic record of the first retrospective round-table talk (kaiko zadankai) on the early Seoul Chamber of Commerce (March 1940), in Keijo Shoko Kaigisho nijugonenshi [hereafter KSKN], ed. Ito Seikaku (Keijo [Seoul]: Keijo Shoko Kaigisho, 1941), part 3: fuhen, 29. 15 Duus, The Abacus, 256. 16 Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 2 (Keijo [Seoul]: Keijofu, 1936), 591, 622. 17 Chosen S5tokufu, Chosen Sotokufu tokei nenpd (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Sotokufu), 1906-1944; Okurasho Kanri Kyoku, ed., Nihonjin no kaigai katsudo ni kansuru rekishiteki chosa, vol. 7, no. 6 (Ch5sen-hen) (Tokyo: Okura-sho Kanri Kyoku, 1947-), 150-151; for the year 1944, Chosen Sotokufu, Jinko chosa kekka hokoku, May 1944, part 1 (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Sotokufu, 1944), 1.

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unfavorable exchange rate, for imports from Japan such as cotton goods, hardware, kerosene, dyestuffs, salt, and farming tools. Commonly, the Japanese merchants made cash advances to Korean farmers for their purchases, and claimed their crops at harvest time. The more dishonest ones ran away from their Korean debtors until the due date had passed as a way of claiming Korean land as collateral. Low-class and hard-pressed settlers especially looked for the easiest ways out of their poverty, which often led to dishonest commercial practices that bordered on fraud, such as tricking Koreans into buying shoddy goods or charging ten times more than the original price of imported goods.18 Many Japanese also engaged in the illicit ginseng trade and the forging of counterfeit Korean coins. After the Sino-Japanese War, some of these settlers began to grow into big landlords, who owned and managed agricultural lands they had siphoned off from Koreans, or lived off rents collected from Korean tenant farmers as absentee landlords. Early settlers liked to portray their success as an achievement by a trailblazer or a self-made man. The character of Japanese expansion into Korea does not comfortably fit the pattern of “trade following the flag,” for the adventures of settler pioneers in many ways preceded the state in laying the scaffolding for the empire. Nonetheless, in contrast to the Japanese migrant laborers working on sugar cane farms and factories in Hawaii or on railways, mines or farms in North America, the Japanese migrants to Korea enjoyed a variety of official assistance and protection for their commercial endeavors. First of all, the conclusion of the “unequal treaties” with Korea in 1876 allowed the Japanese to enjoy extraterritoriality. The absence of tariffs in the early years and the right to

18 Nikkan Tstisho Kyokai, Nikkan Tsusho Kyokai Hokoku, vol. 2 (October 1895; repr., Seoul: Asea Munhwasa, 1983), 19.

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use Japanese currency in the Japanese settlements allowed Japanese merchants to operate smoothly and advantageously. The Japanese government also helped build the Japanese settlement in each treaty port. For instance, it secured land for the Japanese settlement in Pusan, and provided financial assistance for building stores and opening a steamship route in Wonsan.19 Moreover, the government facilitated Japanese travel to Korea by issuing passports outside of the open ports in Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Shimane, Fukuoka, Kagoshima and Nagasaki, exempting travelers to China and Korea from the strict inspection required by the Immigration Protection Law in 1902, and removing the requirement for passports altogether in 1904. At the same time, the authorities sought to regulate the migration of unruly or undesirable elements by issuing the “Regulations Concerning Japanese Residents in China and Korea” in 1883. Although these regulations were designed to avoid tarnishing the image of Japanese in the eyes of foreigners, the number of illegal prostitutes continued to rise and ronin kept coming to the peninsula.20 The foremost concern of the Meiji government was to promote large-scale Japanese investment in Korea by offering protection and financial assistance to big corporations and banks, such as Mitsubishi and the Daiichi National Bank. The government thus gave special rights to the Okura-gumi for railway construction, mining rights to Furukawa, Asano, and Shibusawa, and a monopoly on ginseng trade to Mitsui.21 In spite of these official provisions, however, big capitalists remained reluctant to invest in the politically unstable peninsula. Given the insufficient presence of large capital, the migration and settlement of small- and

19 Kimura, Zaicho Nihonjin, 21. 20 The regulations included a stipulation for deporting those who obstructed or threatened to obstruct peace, and were augmented by an additional regulation of illegal prostitution in 1885. Ibid., 25. 21 Ibid., 19-20.

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medium-sized merchants came to be seen as a strategically important “beachhead” for continental expansion vis-a-vis China and Russia.22 The Japanese government accordingly provided a variety of measures of protection and support to local merchants and fishermen. When the port of Wonsan was opened in 1880, for instance, the government offered support that ran the whole gamut from providing financial assistance for setting up shops and creating a building to display Japanese products, to stationing police officers, sending a battleship for “the security of business,” and providing funds for increasing ports o f call for mail steamers and liners.23 Settlers, in turn, demanded more official protection and assistance in pursuing their aggressive commercial tactics. Japanese merchants often petitioned the Tokyo government, via local consuls, to enforce and defend the right to no tariffs acquired by the 1876 unequal treaty against periodic Korean campaigns to recover the right to levy import tariffs. Yamaguchi Tahee, who came to Korea penniless at the age of twenty in 1884, became one of Seoul’s most powerful merchants by taking advantage of this treaty settlement. When his merchandize (ox hide) bound for In’chon was seized at Namdaemun by Korean military guards because he failed to pay the required taxes levied on all commodities leaving Seoul at the time, Yamaguchi appealed to the Japanese consul for help, but the consul refused to negotiate with the Korean authorities. Determined to “punish” the “Korean robbers” on his own “in accordance with the treaty provisions,” implacable Yamaguchi rushed back to the

22 Kimura, “Kindai Nihon no ixnin, shokumin katsudo to chukanso,” 169. 23 Kimuia, Zaicho Nihonjin, 21.

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gate with a “Japanese sword,” and frightened the Korean guards into giving him what he wanted.24 Settlers also prodded the Meiji government to negotiate indemnities from the Korean government for losses they incurred from periodic grain embargoes. As a traditional method of dealing with local grain shortages, the Korean government occasionally imposed bans on the export of Korean rice in some provinces. The revision of the terms of the Kanghwa treaty in 1883 allowed the Korean government to embargo the export o f rice, barley, and soybeans with one month’s notice to the Japanese consular authorities. However, local Korean officials were compelled to impose ad hoc embargoes without following the proper procedures, as Japanese traders increasingly penetrated into the interior and imposed pressures on the local food supply. This culminated in a conflict between the two countries in 1889, when the Korean government imposed grain embargoes in Hwanghae and Hamgyong Provinces. The settlers in Wonsan and other cities urged the local diplomat to pressure the Korean government into suspending its ban. They even dispatched representatives to Tokyo and appealed to popular parties that were beginning to shift to more hard-line diplomacy at the time. Ultimately, the lobbyists successfully moved the Japanese government to force the Korean authorities to lift the embargoes and dismiss the local officials responsible, as well as extracting indemnities of 110,000 yen.25 This kind of incident frequently occurred, vividly demonstrating how settlers acted as “subimperialists” on the periphery o f empire where “the metropolitan dog” was “wagged by its colonial tail.”26

24 Kitagawa Yoshiaki, ed., Yamaguchi Tahee ou (Keijo [Seoul]: Yamaguchi Tahee ou Hyoshokai, 1934), 25-27. 25 Yoshino Makoto, “Richo makki ni okeru beikoku yushutsu no tenkai to bbkokurei,” Chosenshi Kenkyukai ronbunshu (Chosenshi Kenkyukai) 15 (March 1978): 101-131. 26 D. K. Fieldhouse, “Imperialism and the Periphery,” in Wright, The ‘New Imperialism

186.

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Moreover, in the face of competition from Chinese and European merchants, local Japanese merchants urged the consular and metropolitan authorities to facilitate Japanese peddling activity as a means of penetrating further into the Korean economy. The Seoul and In’chon Chambers of Commerce successfully demanded that the authorities support the operations of the Keirin Shogyodan, an armed itinerant merchants’ association based in In’chon.27 After the Japanese obtained the right to travel inland in 1885, Japanese peddlers, about 2,400 in total, began to operate in various provinces through a network of branches located in P’yongyang, Kaesong, Seoul, Wonsan, Taegu, Mokp’o, and Chinnamp’o. The peddlers frequently used threats of violence in selling shoddy goods and phony medicines to poor Korean farmers. The notorious practices of the Keirin Shogyodan provoked much Korean animosity and the organization was eventually ordered to dissolve by the Japanese government in 1898.28 In addition to supporting peddling activity, the Japanese government also invited more large-scale merchants to Korea, and promoted joint commercial ventures and the institutionalization of local chambers of commerce as a counterweight to the power of Chinese merchants.29 In spite of state support, however, in the 1880s and the early 1890s Japanese merchants faced tough competition from Chinese merchants in both treaty port commerce and inland trade. As one settler recalled, Japanese commercial power was small and feeble compared to the dominance of Chinese merchants, who not only had unrivaled commercial skills but the backing of Yuan Shih-k’ai (then “Director-General Resident in

27 KSKN, part 1: enkaku-hen, 36-38. 28 [Gaimu Daijin Kanbo] Bunshoka, ed., Nihon gaiko monjo, vol. 31 (Tokyo: [Gaimu Daijin Kanbo] Bunshoka, 1898), 1193-1197. 29 Kimura, “Kindai Nihon no imin, shokumin katsudo to chukanso,” 168-9.

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Korea of Diplomatic and Commerical Relations”), who dominated the Korean court at the time. When a Korean faulted on payment to a Chinese merchant, for instance, Yuan would ruthlessly “drag him to the legation and imprison him there.”30 Before the Sino-Japanese War, therefore, Japanese shops in Seoul remained confined to a tiny settlement and “could not expand beyond the district from Kameya to Kitajima Pharmacy in Honmachi 2-chome.” The morning market at Namdaemun would be totally dominated by Chinese, and even when a Japanese merchant managed to find an open spot, “a Chinese would come over later and knock him over, claiming it as his territory.”31 In the face of such Chinese high-handedness, in the early 1890s representatives of Japanese residents in Seoul petitioned the local consul as well as the Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu, pleading with them to increase the number of consular police officers or send in more Japanese troops to combat “Chinese and Korean oppression.”32 Until the Sino-Japanese War, however, the Japanese legation largely acquiesced to Chinese dominance out o f a concern to avoid diplomatic trouble.

Settlers during the Sino-Japanese War Early Japanese settlers were also frequently drawn into the radical and revolutionary processes that were transforming late Choson Korea. They became direct targets of Korean anti-imperial resistance and peasant protests, such as the uibyong or “righteous armies” rebellions and the Tonghak (Eastern Learning) peasant uprisings that led to the outbreak of

30 A stenographic record of the first retrospective round-table talk (kaiko zadankai) on the early Seoul Chamber of Commerce (March 14, 1940), in KSKN, part 3: fiihen, 26. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., part 1: enkaku-hen, 30-33; Kawabata Gentaro, Keijo to naichijin (Keijo [Seoul]: Nikkan Shobo, 1910), 31-32.

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the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. Upon hearing the rumor that the Tonghaks, who rose in rebellion in the spring of 1894, were going to attack the Japanese settlement in Seoul, for instance, Yamaguchi Tahee and other settler leaders immediately petitioned Foreign Minister Mutsu to increase the number of local police officers for protection, while the consul Sugimura coordinated with local residents and navy and army officers to prepare for emergency with “ninety rifles.”33 Far from being passive targets or victims of Korean attacks, however, settlers actively joined in Japan’s aggressive gestures toward Korea. This is demonstrated most clearly in settlers’ support for Japan’s two imperialistic wars over the Korean peninsula against Qing China in 1894-5 and against Russia in 1904-5. During the Sino-Japanese War, settlers aided the operations of Japanese troops by supplying food and shelter and volunteering their labor for various duties. When the Qing troops landed at the port of Asan, about 70 settler leaders in Seoul petitioned Foreign Minister Mutsu, asking him to immediately dispatch “several thousand best soldiers” to Korea, hoping them to oust the “tyranny” of Chinese from the peninsula and allow “Japanese residents to live in eternal peace and project the power o f our Japanese nation overseas.”34 In In’chon, settlers created a special organization to welcome Japanese troops, while in Wonsan local Japanese residents built new garrison barracks.35 The Sino-Japanese War also drew a rather different sort o f imperial broker from home: continental adventurers (roniri) and members of patriotic societies. As the earliest visionaries of empire, often known as “men of purpose” (shishi), continental adventurers

33 Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 1 (1934), 561. 34 Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, Keijo Hattatsushi (Keijo [Seoul]: Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, 1912), 66-68; Keijo fushi, vol. 1, 562. 35 Kimura, Zaicho Nihonjin, 74.

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traveled between Japan and the Asian continent seeking to project the spirit of Meiji reform onto its Asian neighbors, assist their self-strengthening efforts, and bring about a PanAsianist revolution under Japanese leadership. Such a bold vision was nurtured in a hotbed of ultranationalism in Kyushu, which was home to the largest patriotic society, the Genyosha.36 The Genyosha leaders, such as Toyama Mitsuru and Uchida Ryohei, intervened in Korean court politics by establishing connections with reformist officials in the progressive party of Kim Ok-kyun and supporting their struggles against the conservative faction in the 1880s. Interestingly, the Genyosha members contacted the Tonghak leaders, who, like the Japanese ultranationalists, fiercely rejected Westem-style modernization and defended the traditional Confiician system. In the spring o f 1894, when the Tonghaks waged a rebellion against the Korean government, demanding the expulsion of foreigners (Westerners as well as Japanese) from the peninsula, Uchida Ryohei and fellow members o f the Genyosha rushed to their side, offering their assistance. They called themselves the Tenyukyo (Heavenly Blessing Heroes) and joined the Tonghaks in their struggle against the government enslaved to foreign powers.37 Although the Genyosha members essentially sought to expand Japan’s influence in Asia, their activities could also obstruct and contradict the efforts of the Japanese government to increase its political hold over Korea.38

36 The Genyosha was formed in 1881. Later its leaders formed the Kokuryukai or Amur Society in 1901. 37 For details of the Tenyukyo’s activities, see Kokuryukai, ed., Toa senkaku shishi kiden,jo-kan (Tokyo: Hara Shobo, 1966), 173-296. Hilary Conroy describes the Tonghak rebels as “the ideological counterparts of Japanese reactionaries” represented by the Genyosha members. See Conroy, The Japanese Seizure o f Korea, 230-231,414-418. 38 Kevin Doak suggests that the Amur River Society (Kokuryukai), founded by former members of the Genyosha in 1901, represented an incipient form of “ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi)” as distinguished from “state nationalism (kokka shugi).” This distinction is useful for understanding the tension between the activities of ultranationalists and the political designs of the Japanese government in late Choson Korea. Kevin M. Doak, “Ethnic Nationalism and Romanticism in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” Journal o f Japanese Studies 22, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 82-83.

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The outbreak o f the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 finally broke the impasse for the settlers in Korea. The war brought lucrative profit-making opportunities to settlers and camp followers alike, turning some into rich men overnight.39 Japan’s victory over China further consolidated the framework for Japanese economic domination by removing the power of Chinese and Western merchants from the peninsula. By the early 1890s, the Japanese dominated not only Korea’s foreign trade—with over 90 percent of Korean exports going to Japan and more than half of Korean imports coming from Japan—but also the carrying trade at the Korean ports where over 70 percent of merchant ships were Japanese.40 In the wake of Japan’s victory also followed a first large wave o f Japanese migration, which dramatically expanded the Japanese settlements around the peninsula.

Settler Political Activism Although the war crushed China’s last bid for predominance over Korea, Japan continued to struggle to find stable allies and increase its influence at the Korean court vis-avis the Western powers— especially Russia and the United States who had successfully won economic concessions from Korea. In particular, the Triple Intervention by Russia, Germany, and France, who forced the victorious Japanese state to retrocede the Liaodong Peninsula to China, was a psychological blow to Japan’s status quo, shattering the prospect o f railroad and telegraph concessions as well. As Korean leaders looked to foreign representatives, especially Russians, to fend off Japanese pressure, settlers and local officials collaborated as “men on the spot” in launching a series of maneuvers to reverse the political tide.

39 Takasaki Soji, Shokuminchiki Chosen no Nihonjin (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002), 48-49. 40 Carter J Eckert et al., eds., Korea Old and New: A History (Seoul: Ilchokak, 1990), 215.

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The best example was a plot to assassinate Queen Min, engineered by Miura Goro who replaced Inoue Kaoru as minister to Korea in September 1895. Only a few months after its formation, the moderate reformist cabinet headed by Kim Hong-jip came under threat of being overthrown by the queen and her anti-Japanese faction, with rumors of plots and rebellions against Kim’s cabinet permeating the capital and reaching the ears of Miura as well. To prevent her return to the center stage of court politics, which would diminish Japanese influence and halt the on-going reform program, the new minister and the legation staff members allied with the Taewongun, father of King Kojong and a disgruntled old regent, who was looking for an opportunity to oust the Min and return to power. With the Taewon’gun’s full support, Miura, Okamoto Ryunosuke (a legation staff member), and Kusunose (a military attache) masterminded a plot to overthrow the Min by assassinating the queen. The coup was finally carried out on October 8 by Korean hullydndae troops, and was backed by an entire spectrum of settlers, from patriotic society members and Japanese employees o f the Korean government, to journalists, policemen, and ordinary residents. In this collaborative undertaking, the Japanese legation guard and the Korean troops escorted the Taewongun, local Japanese policemen “scaled the wall to open the palace gate,” and Japanese civilian toughs41 joined the troops in attacking the palace, which resulted in the murder of the queen, her ladies-in-waiting, and the minister o f the royal household.42 Particularly noteworthy was the role of settlers from Kumamoto Prefecture, namely the editorial staff of the Kanjo Shinpd such as Adachi Kenzo, Kunitomo Shigeaki, and Kikuchi

41 For more details, see Kokuryukai, Toa senkaku shishi kiden.jd, 511-547; Pak Chong-gun, Nisshin senso to Chosen (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1982), 255-303. 42 For more details on the coup, see Kikuchi Kenjo, Daiinkun-den: Chosen saikin gaikdshi (Keijo [Seoul]: Nikkan Shobo, 1910); Chofu Sanjin [Kikuchi Kenjo’s pen name], Kindai Chosen no yokogao (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Kenkyukai, 1936), 303-313; Kokuryukai, Toa senkaku shishi kiden, io-kan, 511-547; Duus, The Abacus, 108-112.

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Kenjo 43 During the coup, for example, Kikuchi Kenjo escorted the TaewSngun to the palace and personally delivered reports on the developments, including his own eyewitness report on the blood-stained murder scene in the queen’s bedchamber. As a result of this incident, Kikuchi developed a close personal relationship to the Taewon’gun 44 Miura and forty-seven other Japanese privy to the plot were deported to Japan and arrested and imprisoned upon arrival in Hiroshima. Before they were shipped back to Japan, the sympathetic local Japanese community threw a farewell party for them. Some members of the residents’ association demanded that the central government rescind the expulsion order altogether 45 In the end, these men were quickly released the following January, allowing journalists like Kikuchi and Sasa Masayuki to return to Korea to resume management of the Kanjo Shinpo.

Building Railroads In this period, settler merchants also demonstrated an impressive show of patriotism. By the 1890s, the Meiji leaders had become aware of the important link between economic competition and political domination, and joined the race for railway concessions to gain exclusive rights to raw materials, markets, or naval stations in Korea vis-a-vis Western competitors, especially Russia. Settler merchants bolstered such Japan’s effort on the ground. They lobbied especially hard for railroads to build an infrastructure for full exploitation of

4j Kikuchi Kenjo became the president in 1900. Kokuryukai, Toa senkaku shishi kiden, jo-kan, 517, 546547. 44 Kikuchi Kenjo, Kindai Chosen-shi, ge-kan (Tokyo: Tairiku Kenkyusho, 1940 [1937]), 417-18; Chofu Sanjin, Kindai Chosen rimenshi (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Kenkyukai, 1936), 272-310. He wrote about the Taewon’gun in Choson ch ’oegun oegyosa Taewon ’gun chon: pu wangbi no ilsaeng (Keijo [Seoul]: Nikkan Shobo, 1910). 45 Kokuryukai, Toa senkaku shishi kiden, jo-kan, 537.

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Korea’s resources and expansion of Japanese settlements around the peninsula. The most representative example is the cooperative effort of settlers, officials, and metropolitan concessionaires to secure rights to build the Seoul-Pusan Line, which was considered the foremost priority by the Japanese government in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War.46 The Korean government had long put off the Japanese demand for a railroad treaty, but the victory in the Sino-Japanese War allowed the Japanese to gain special rights of railway construction in Korea. After the Triple Intervention and during King Kojong’s oneyear flight to the Russian legation in the wake of Queen Min’s assassination in 1896-7, however, the Japanese influence at the court suddenly diminished and Russia rapidly extended its influence. These developments brought the demise of the Japanese-sponsored Kabo reform and a reversal of the political situation, culminating in the assassination of proJapanese cabinet members and the creation of a new cabinet composed of pro-Russian (and pro-American) officials such as Yi Pom-jin and Yi Wan-yong. Moreover, in March 1896 the Korean government decided to grant construction rights for the Seoul-In’chon line to James R. Morse, an American businessman and a former Korean consul. While the alarmed Japanese protested the Korean decision in vain, the French quickly moved to acquire rights to build the Seoul-Uiju Line, with the aid of the Russian minister Waeber 47 The Japanese settlers in Seoul rose in protest under the leadership o f Yamaguchi Tahee, who headed the Seoul Residents’ Association and served on the executive board of the Seoul Chamber at the time. The Seoul Chamber emphasized the “urgent necessity” of securing the rights to build the Seoul-Pusan railway. Other chambers in In’chon, Pusan, and

46 For details of the railway movement in 1896-1897, see Duus, The Abacus, 138-157. Here I will focus on the role and involvement of Japanese settlers in Korea. 47 Duus, The Abacus, 140.

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Wonsan followed its lead in passing similar resolutions demanding construction rights for the Seoul-Pusan line. When the minister Komura Jutaro opposed the settlers’ plan to lobby at the metropole out of fear o f endangering national politics, Yamaguchi decided to go to Tokyo alone.48 Yamaguchi first visited Fukuzawa Yukichi and explained the details of the plan for the Seoul-Pusan line, but Fukuzawa’s support was not forthcoming. Judging that Fukuzawa was not well-informed about Korean affairs, Yamaguchi next visited the Japanese army general chief of staff Kawakami at his sickbed. Impressed by Yamaguchi’s enthusiasm, Kawakami immediately called Major General Terauchi from the General Staff Office and told him to assist Yamaguchi and introduce him to other powerful individuals.49 Yamaguchi, Wada Tsuneichi, and other settler lobbyists joined a group of metropolitan civilian concessionaires led by Omiwa Chobei in petitioning at the Tokyo government.50 In June 1896, Omiwa and Yamaguchi prodded the home government to start negotiations on railway construction rights with the Korean court and prevent the interference of other countries. Prime Minister Ito, Foreign Minister Mutsu, and Inoue Kaoru initially showed reluctance due to the difficulty o f attracting investors in a risky overseas venture and their desire to avoid causing friction with Western powers. But the railway promoters gained support from the mass media51 as well as leading entrepreneurs and financial magnates in

48 Kitagawa, Yamaguchi, 34-35. 49 Ibid., 56-57. Fukuzawa considered the plan to be out of the question for the Japanese government, which faced serious financial difficulties caused by the Sino-Japanese War and had no money to spare for a foreign country. 50 A group of civilian concessionaires drew up plans for the creation of a Korean central bank and a Japanese company to build both the Seoul-Pusan Line and the Seoul-In’chdn Line, and petitioned the government in March 1895. Takahashi Yasutaka, “Shokuminchi no tetsudo to kaiun,” in Shokuminchika to sangydka, Iwanami Koza: Kindai Nihon to Shokuminchi 3 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), 271. 51 The lobbyists received support from Fukumoto Nichinan of the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun and Nakai Kinjo (a former settler leader in Seoul) of the Yomiuri Shinbun. Nakai Kinjo, Chosen kaikoroku (Tokyo: Togyo Kenkyukai Shuppanbu, 1915), 13-15.

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Japan, including Oe Taku (director of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and vice-head of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce), Shibusawa Eiichi (Dai-Ichi Bank), Inoue Kakugoro (Dietman), and Masuda Takashi (Mitsui Bussan). Worried about the prospect of domestic criticism for failing to support the promoters and letting the concession pass to another power, Prime Minister Ito agreed to back their movement if the lobbyists recruited one hundred supporters. In July, having gathered over 100 such supporters, the lobbyists held an organizers’ meeting and began to prepare for the creation of the Seoul-Pusan Railway Company.52 In the same month, when Yamaguchi heard about the French securing rights to build a Seoul-Pusan and a Seoul-Uiju line, he returned at once to Seoul, and used his “private money” to “buy off several officials” in order to gain these construction rights.53 Shin Tatsuma, a fellow merchant, proudly reminisced how one merchant like Yamaguchi had the foresight to link railway building to the future relations between Japan and Korea, and to “cast a net of spies deep into the interior of the Korean government to keep watch on the developments.” In his view, Yamaguchi’s “contribution to the state” went beyond “the usual work of a merchant guided by the abacus” and represented a heroic act o f “a patriot (kokushi) or a loyalist (shishi).”54 Although the Japanese were not able to win the Seoul-Pusan concession immediately due to political disturbances in southern Korea, the joint lobbying effort of the Omiwa group and the Seoul Chamber now had the full support of the home government. The opportunity came with the decline of Russian influence in Seoul in the spring of 1898. As a result of

52 Takahashi Yasutaka, “Shokuminchi no tetsudo to kaiun,” 271; Duus, The Abacus, 141. 53 Kitagawa, Yamaguchi, 58. Yamaguchi apparently “offered Foreign Minister Yi Wan-yong 50,000 yen to persuade him to put off the French request for a concession until the fall of 1896.” Duus, The Abacus, 141. 54 Shin Tatsuma, “Shikon shosai no Yamaguchi ou,” in Kitagawa, Yamaguchi, 147-148.

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negotiations between the Korean government and the Japanese minister in Seoul, the Japanese finally secured Korean agreement to grant them the right to construct the SeoulPusan Line in September 189 8.55 As the prospect o f war with Russia loomed large toward the end of 1903, the Japanese government took over the operation o f the Seoul-Pusan Railway Company.56 The line was eventually completed in January 1905.57 On the eve o f the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese had come to control all the key railway lines in Korea. Settlers also aided the officials in warding off the Russian influence in other ways. During the Masanp’o Incident of 1899, for instance, one of the largest settler landlords, Hazama Fusataro of Pusan, volunteered his assistance in buying one parcel of land after another in Masanp’o in his name with discretionary funds from the General Staff Office, in order to prevent the Russians from concluding a lease of the area with the Korean government.58 By linking up with metropolitan concessionaires as well as government and army officials, settlers actively supported Japan’s empire-building to create a Japanesedominated economic infrastructure in Korea.

55 The deterioration of Japan’s relationship with Russia and the difficulty of procuring necessary capital delayed the construction of the line for a few years. In response to the active lobbying effort of the Seoul Chamber and the Omiwa group, the Yamagata cabinet guaranteed a 6 % subsidy for dividends on the planned company’s paid-in capital for a period of fifteen years. This allowed the promoters to establish the Seoul-Pusan Railway Company with Shibusawa Eiichi as its president in June 1901. Takahashi, “Shokuminchi no tetsudo to kaiun,” 272; Duus, The Abacus, 151. 56 Duus, The Abacus, 153-4. 57 Meanwhile, the Japanese also managed to recapture the Seoul-In’chon Line from the Americans. Kitagawa, Yamaguchi, 59-60; Duus, The Abacus, 142-145. 58 Takasaki, Shokuminchi Chosen no Nihonjin, 74.

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Settler under Protectorate Rule Meanwhile, having worked with France and Germany to cow Japan into diplomatic submission in 1895, Russia consolidated its position in Manchuria by acquiring from China the right to build the eastern branches o f the Trans-Siberian Railway through Manchuria, and obtaining a twenty-five-year lease on Port Arthur and Dairen and the right to link these two ports to the Trans-Siberian Line. As Russia built its sphere of influence in Manchuria and a launch pad for penetrating into Korea, the new Katsura Cabinet also began to prepare for the establishment of a Japanese protectorate over Korea. By this time, both moderates and radicals in the cabinet had reached a consensus on the protectorate as a solution to what they considered the Korean government’s bankmptcy and incapacity for reform. The tension reached its height when Russia sent many troops into Manchuria in response to the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, and kept its force in the area even after the uprising had been suppressed. Japan promptly concluded an alliance with England in 1902—the two nations trading pledges of support for each other in military conflict against a third power—while rebuffing the Russian proposal for an “exchange of Manchuria for Korea.” Japan subsequently pressured the Russians to withdraw from Manchuria, but Russia refused and even crossed the Yalu River to occupy the port town of Yongamp’o. When both sides exhausted all diplomatic means of securing their respective interests in Manchuria and Korea, Japan declared war on Russia—now with the clear goal of establishing direct political control over Korea.59 When the war against Russia finally broke out in 1904, settlers and camp followers again supported the Japanese troop operations. The Japanese residents in Seoul divided their settlement into Western, Central, and Eastern districts and organized volunteer soldiers 59 Duus, The Abacus, 182-7. This refers to the Katsura Cabinet’s May 1904 plan.

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(giyuhei) in anticipation of attack from Russian and Korean soldiers. In particular, ultranationalists in the settler community— Sasa Masayuki (younger brother of Sasa Yubo) and the Korean-language exchange students from Kumamoto he oversaw, as well as employees of the Kanjo Shinpo—played an active role in organizing settler defense. The Japanese students from Kumamoto, along with the Korean students in Japanese-language schools, also served as translators for the army advancing to the north.60 When the leaders of the residents’ associations convened in In’chon in April 1904, they already planned to present congratulatory words to the Imperial Headquarters, and agreed to promote postal savings in each settlement as “a token of sincerity for supplementing the military expenditure.”61 No less important was the role of settler women, especially wives o f officials and settler leaders. They enthusiastically responded to the patriotic call of Okumura Ioko, a female educator from Japan, to give relief to families of deceased soldiers in Korea. Having visited the Japanese troops dispatched from Hiroshima to quell the Boxer Rebellion in China and witnessed the appalling conditions and sacrifice of soldiers at the front, Okumura called for relief to the families of the deceased, and on her way back to Japan stopped at In’chon, Seoul, and Pusan to give speeches and solicit donations. Japanese women in Pusan and Seoul responded promptly by donating a huge sum of money, which provided Okumura with the financial basis for founding the Patriotic Women’s Association in Tokyo in 1905.62 With the support of Yamaguchi Tahee and other settler leaders, a Korean headquarters o f the association was also set up in Seoul and a network of its branches spread around the Korean

60 Jinsen-fu, ed., Jinsen fushi (Jinsen [In’chon]: Jinsen-fu, 1933), 714; Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 1, 729. 61 Keijo KyoryQmindan Yakusho, Keijo Hattatsushi, 133. 62 Mitsui Kozaburo, Aikoku Fujinkai shi (Tokyo: Aikoku Fujinkaisha, 1913), 7-11; Aikoku Fujinkai, ed., Okumura Ioko shoden (Tokyo: Aikoku Fujinkai, 1908), 159-160.

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peninsula.63 When the righteous armies, joined by disbanded soldiers of the Korean army, carried out guerrilla attacks on Japanese garrisons in 1907, members of the Patriotic Women’s Association, mostly wives of high-ranking officials and Korean aristocratic women, nursed the sick and injured soldiers “night and day.” They also sent condolence money and imon bags to the families of the soldiers and military police officers policing the border who were killed by Korean guerilla forces.64 Japan’s victory over Russia drove out the last major imperialist rival from the peninsula. Having also secured agreements of the Americans and the British to respect Japan’s new role in Korea, in 1905 the Japanese established a protectorate government under Resident-General Ito Hirobumi. Convinced of Japan’s “civilizing mission” to modernize Korea, Ito implemented a kind of indirect mle by placing Japanese advisors in the Korean government to carry out reform under Japanese guidance and build Korea as a reliable ally. At the same time, he tried to block interference from the military or the Foreign Ministry who argued for a more aggressive policy. The establishment of the Japanese protectorate also brought the largest migration wave from home, with the year 1906 adding a phenomenal 40,000, and increasing the Japanese population in Korea to nearly 100,000 by the end of 1907.65 Under the secure framework of Japanese political dominance, the settler communities gradually stabilized, with a large number of migrants coming as families, who were now more inclined to make

63 Ohashi Jiro, “Keijo fujinkai no konjaku,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, April 1932, 72. The association was financially supported by Resident-General Ito and the Yi Royal Household Agency. 64 Ibid., 73. 65 Chosen Sotokufu Shomu Chosaka, ed., Chosen ni okeru naichijin, Chosen Sotokufu Chosa Shiryo 2 (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Sotokufu, 1924), 4.

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Korea their home. The ratio of men to women also became increasingly equal over time (table l).66

Table 1: Growth of Japanese Population in Korea, 1880-1944 1920

1944

1880

1890

1900

1910

Male

550

4,564

8,768

92,751

185,560

260,391

356,226

345,561

Female

285

2,681

7,061

78,792

161,059

241,476

333,564

567,022

Total

835

7,245

15,829

171,543

347,850

501,867

689,790

912,583

1930

1940

SOURCE: Figures for 1880-1940, Tange Ikutaro, ed., Chosen ni okeru jinko ni kansuru shotokei (Chosen Kosei Kyokai, 1943), 3-4. Figures for 1944, Chosen Sotokufu, Jinko chosa kekka hokoku (Chosen Sotokufu, May 1944), 1.

The settler community also became more middle-class or lower-middle class in character. As in Japan’s cities during this period, Japanese urban residents in Korea came to represent a mixture of “old” and “new middle classes.” Retail merchants, wholesalers, and petty manufacturers made up the largest category, and catered to an increasing number of educated salaried employees of companies, professionals, technicians, engineers, administrative clerks, and public officials who staffed the growing bureaucratic apparatus of Japanese rule. At the end of 1907, for instance, 10,655 Japanese or about 10% of the settler population in Korea worked for the Residency-General or the Korean government (table 2). In addition to new recruits from the metropole, many settlers were also hired for low-level positions in the newly created police, postal service, and tax collection offices, as well as for jobs as interpreters and translators.67 Because land was so cheap, many settlers, from

66 In the 1880s and the 1890s, women constituted about 30-40% of Japanese residents, but this figure rose to 45% in the 1900s and remained so through the 1920s. Up until the 1900s, an increase in female population was largely attributed to the growing number of geisha and waitresses. The subsequent rise in the number of female migrants, accompanied by an increase in the number of young-aged Japanese, also indicates an increasing degree of Japanese entrenchment in Korea. Tange Ikutaro, ed., Chosen ni okeru jinko ni kansuru shotokei (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Kosei Kyokai, 1943), 3-4. 67 Duus, The Abacus, 342.

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shopkeepers and money lenders to police officers, school teachers, and priests, owned small plots of land in the countryside and became absentee landlords to supplement their regular income.

Table 2: Occupations of Japanese Residents in Korea, End of 1907 Occupation

# of Employed

Family member

1,298 Agriculture Fishing 1,218 Manufacturing 4,070 Commerce 12,571 Officials Government officials 3,940 Public officials 221 Laborers 4,405 2,562 Geisha, waitresses Professionals Doctors 206 Midwives 80 252 Teachers Journalists 119 Lawyers/prosecutors 25 Buddhist monks/missionaries 86 Shinto priests 10 Miscellaneous 7,264 Unemployed 423 Total 38,749

Total

%

2,251 1,353 6,677 22,407

3,548 2,571 10,747 34,978

4% 3% 11% 36%

6,052 442 5,476 113

9,992 663 9,881 2,675

10%

461 83 270 233 45 84 27 10,487 2,791 59,252

667 163 522 352 70 170 37 17,751 3,214 98,001

10% 3% 2%

18% 3% 100%

SOURCE: Tokanfu, Dai 2-ji Tokanfu tokei nenpd (1909), 46-47.

While most of these settlers were voluntary migrants, the Tokyo government also sponsored some agricultural settlement programs to export Japanese farmers as model colonists. After gaining the right to own land in Korea in 1904, the Japanese government established a quasi-official Oriental Development Company (hereafter ODC) in 1908 to promote the migration of Japanese agricultural settlers to Korea.68 This state-sponsored project had a grandiose plan to settle between 10,000 to 30,000 Japanese emigrants per.year

68 It was run as a joint Japanese-Korean enterprise. Few studies on the ODC include Kurose Yuji, Toyo Takushoku Kaisha: Nihon teikokushugi toAjia taiheiyd (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha, 2003); and Kawai Kazuo et al., ed., Kokusaku-gaisha Totaku no kenkyu (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 2000).

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during the first few years of operation. But the Japanese soon realized that this target was too unrealistic, and scaled it down considerably. By the time of annexation, they were seeking to send between 1,000 and 1,500 households per year. To much Japanese disappointment, however, only 160 migrated in 1911, and even in the peak year of 1914 a little less than 800 migrated, and many households that migrated eventually returned home.69 The ODC’s failure was due to unrealistic projections and overestimation o f the amount of uncultivated land acquired by the company, as well as a lack of direct financial support for rural migrants.70 Nonetheless, the ODC played a pivotal role in bringing much Korean land under Japanese control, and the ODC farmers became the frequent target of Korean animosity. Since the establishment of a protectorate in 1905, the Japanese also accelerated their seizure and ownership o f Korean wasteland and forest resources, including former holdings of the Korean government and the royal court. By 1910, the Government-General became the largest landholder in Korea. After the failure of the Nagamori Plan in 1904,71 settlers also prodded the Japanese government to legalize Japanese rights to buy, sell or permanently lease privately owned land outside the treaty limit. When Yi Yong-ik, a former leader of the Kabo reforms and governor of North Kyongsang Province, outlawed land sales to Japanese, the local Japanese press in Taegu ran numerous articles bashing him and inciting local Japanese resistance.72 Pressures from the settlers and the Japanese government ultimately compelled

69 Duus, The Abacus, 307-308; and Karl Moskowitz, “The Creation of the Oriental Development Company: Japanese Illusions Meet Korean Reality,” Occasional Papers on Korea 2 (1974): 97-98. 70 Duus, The Abacus, 308-309; Moskowitz, “The Creation of the Oriental Development Company,” 85-87. 71 The Nagamori Plan aimed at bringing most of Korea’s uncultivated wasteland which formed nearly twothirds o f the peninsula under permanent Japanese control. But the plan was foiled by opposition from the Koreans led by yangban elites, Confucian scholars, and former officials. Duus, The Abacus, 368-373. 72 Kawai Asao, Taikyu monogatari (Taikyu [Taegu]: Chosen MinpOsha, 1931), 145-146; Yi Hae-ch’ang, H a n ’guk sinmunsa y o n ’gu (Seoul: Songmun’gak, 1971), 293-4.

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the Korean government to permit foreigners to hold land in the interior and hold leases to develop un-reclaimed government-owned land. The Agricultural and Residential Land Certification Law enacted by the Residency-General in October 1906 enabled settlers to acquire land more easily by legalizing foreign ownership of Korean land.73 The ODC also managed to grow into a major Japanese landholder, and made a profit by lending money to private individuals, mostly settlers, to finance their land purchases. Unlike European settlers in Africa, however, the Japanese settlers never completely dispossessed the Korean people and largely kept the traditional patterns o f landholding and agricultural production intact. By 1910, Japanese landowners came to possess a little less than 3% of all the cultivated land in Korea “concentrating in the fertile riverine plains of North Cholla, South Cholla, and South Kyongsang, or the northwestern coastal plain in the hinterland of P’yongyang and Chinnamp’o.”74 Even in 1918, the ODC held only about a third of all private Japanese possessions. The bulk of the privately held land was in fact owned by corporate landlords, especially commercial interests in Osaka and Kyushu and other largescale Japanese investors in the metropole.75

The Growth o f Settler Communities and Self-government With the expansion of Japanese population grew a network o f community institutions through which settlers managed their daily affairs and developed a sense of solidarity. In the early period, the chambers of commerce functioned as the key voice o f the settler community.

73 Edwin H. Gragert, Landownership under Colonial Rule: Korea’s Japanese Experience, 1900-1935 (Honolulu: University o f Hawaii Press, 1994), 62, 69. Later, the Civil Code of 1912 allowed the Japanese to own and transfer all land legally. 74 Duus, The Abacus, 377. 75 Ibid., 383, 387.

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Following the establishment of the first chamber of commerce in Pusan in 1876, local chambers of commerce were subsequently set up in Wonsan (1881), In’chon (1885), Seoul (1887), and Mokp’o (1900). As more ports were opened in the late 1890s and in the early 1900s, chambers of commerce were also set up in the cities of Chinnamp’o, Kunsan, Masan, Taegu and Ch’onjin after the Russo-Japanese War.76 The chambers o f commerce were initially dominated by the local managers of giant metropolitan firms like Nihon Yusen and the Dai-Ichi Bank or trading companies and banks headquartered in Japan. From the mid1880s, however, smaller merchants and jobbers (nakagaisho) were gradually allowed to join the local chambers, as competition against foreign merchants, especially Chinese merchants, increased.77 After the Russo-Japanese War, the executive boards of the chambers, including the posts of head and vice-head, also came to be dominated by powerful locally-based traders or merchants, while employees of metropolitan banks and corporations became merely “special members” added to the list of executive members.78 As the chambers of commerce passed into the hands of locally influential merchants, they increasingly acquired the character of a lobby of upper-class settlers. Through the chambers of commerce, settler leaders worked with officials to expand Japanese commercial rights in Korea. In the 1880s and the 1890s, they petitioned the home government and local consuls to integrate Korea into closer market relations with the metropole by improving port and harbor facilities, expanding telegraph communications, 76 Chosen Sotokufu, ed., Saikin Chosen jijdydran, vol. 2 (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Sotokufu, 1912), 319-320. 77 A large number of petty merchants, wholesalers, and jobbers were initially excluded from membership, except in Seoul where merchants constituted a minority and virtually everyone including women could join. Duus, The Abacus, 357. 78 Kimura, Zaicho Nihonjin, 88-93.

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increasing shipping services, building new roads and railroads, and promoting Japanese overseas migration. They also helped expand the market for Japanese goods by holding products fairs and exhibitions, and facilitating trade with metropolitan merchants.79 Mediating conflicts among local Japanese merchants was another important task of the chambers. In the early 1890s, for instance, the Seoul Chamber established a network of trade associations to control internecine competition and rampant credit sales (kakeuri) among Japanese merchants, which had caused a severe loss of trust among Korean customers.80 Representatives of regional chambers of commerce also convened a joint meeting every year. They collectively passed resolutions and petitioned the authorities, especially for the removal of domestic tariffs on Korean rice imports, the creation o f financial institutions, the expansion of railways and marine transportation, and compensation for the Japanese victims of “banditry.”81 These agendas, discussed almost every year, reflected not only the settlers’ wish to end the on-going economic depression in Japanese settlements, but also their desire to pre-empt Korean merchants or new comers from the metropole in seizing new opportunities and benefits that accrued from the growing Japanese hegemony in Korea.82 While the Japanese established their own chambers, Korean merchants—kaekchu, yogak, and former yuguijon merchants—in In’chon, Seoul, and other cities formed their own commercial organizations or kaekchu chambers, in order to counter the Japanese

79 In 1888, for instance, the Seoul Chamber persuaded the governor o f Saga Prefecture to promote the export of Arita ceramic ware to Korea and facilitated the business of Arita and Imari merchants. Kawabata, Keijo to naichijin, 30-31. 80 Ibid., 31; Arakawa Goro, Saikin Chosen jijo (Tokyo: Shimizu Shoten, 1906), 180-1. 81 For instance, see the proposals discussed at the Seventh and Eighth Conventions of Japanese Chambers of Commerce in Korea in Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, Keijo Hattatsushi, 334-336. 82 Kimura, Zaicho Nihonjin, 95-96.

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encroachments on the traditional economic structure.83 In In’chSn, before the Japanese established their chamber in 1886, local Korean merchants set up the In’chon Kaekchu-hoe in 1885. The activities of the In’chSn Kaekchu-hoe exhibited a strongly nationalistic character: they aimed to recover commercial rights from rapacious foreign merchants, enlighten the local merchants, and renovate commercial methods to increase the national revenue. For instance, the In’chon Kaekchu-hoe manufactured 1,500 national flags and distributed them to every ward in the city to hoist on national holidays. In the late 1890s, the organization, now renamed the In’chon Sinsang Hyophoe, led a boycott of Japanese merchants and Japanese currency which increasingly threatened the economic activities of local Korean merchants. In April 1896, it demanded the dissolution of the notorious Keirin Shogyodan and called for a unity of merchants around the country to counter its operation. In May 1902, when the Pusan Daiichi Bank “illegally” circulated its bank notes for commercial transactions, the In’chon Sinsang Hyophoe launched a nation-wide protest movement and petitioned the Korean government to prohibit the bank from circulating its currency as the legal tender.84 As the above examples show, the Korean chambers often acted as organs of nationalistic resistance, while the Japanese chambers operated as tools o f economic domination. Nonetheless, after 1905 the Korean and Japanese chambers increasingly promoted business exchange and cooperation between settler and Korean business elites. When the “Nickel Coin Depression” occurred in 1905, for instance, representatives of the Korean and Japanese chambers held several joint meetings to discuss the problem, with Nishihara Kamezo, a secretary of the Hansong Chamber, serving as a liaison between the 83 Yi Chae-hang, ed., Sanggong Hoeuiso paengnydnsa (Seoul: Taehan Sanggong Hoeuiso, 1984), 58-71; Kim Tong-sun, ed., In ’chon Sanggong Hoeuiso kusimnyonsa (In’chon: In’chon Sanggong Hoeuiso, 1979), 119, 121. 84 Yi Chae-hang, Sanggong Hoeuiso paengnydnsa, 64-65.

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two.85 When the righteous armies’ revolt broke out in the summer of 1907, the secretary of the Japanese chamber, Yamaguchi Hajime, visited the Korean-run Chamber and consulted the Korean banks about investigating the revolt’s impact on the economy. In the fall of the same year, the Japanese and Korean members of the two chambers together organized Seoul’s first “Exhibition to Promote the Mutual Development of Japan and Korea (,kydshinkai).” Through such joint activities and business forums, settler and Korean bourgeois elites increasingly cultivated close economic and social relationships. In the early years, chambers of commerce in most treaty ports handled virtually all affairs o f local Japanese residents. As the settler communities grew, however, it became necessary to create separate institutions for dealing with issues concerning the daily lives of Japanese residents, including education, sanitation, transportation, water supplies, and other public facilities. For this purpose, in 1887 the local consuls in In’chon, Pusan, Wonsan, and Seoul issued “regulations concerning Japanese settlements and settlers,” which allowed local Japanese residents to to elect their own headmen (sodai) and members of local residents’ assemblies (kyoryuminchi kaigi).86 The residents’ assemblies were allowed to discuss “all public affairs within the Japanese settlement” and the resident headmen were required to obtain the assembly’s approval of all expenses except for those “requiring urgency.”87 The revised regulations of 1896 further granted the residents’ assemblies legislative power over “all affairs” and the right to petition and submit opinions to the local consul.88

85 KSKN, part one: enkaku-hen, 131. 86 Kimura Kenji, “Zaigai kyoryumin no shakai katsudo,” in Bocho suru teikoku no jinryu, Iwanami Koza: Kindan Nihon to shokuminchi 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), 29. 87 Ibid., 36. 88 Jinsen-fu, Jinsen fa s hi, 159-166.

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But the power o f residents’ assemblies was severely undercut by the local consul, who could regulate their activities or dissolve them at will. Like the early chambers of commerce, the resident assemblies lacked the legal status and ability to issue bonds or levy taxes and fees on residents for implementing local public works. Without a stable and sufficient flow of funds, the resident communities increasingly faced a shortage of public utilities, such as an adequate water supply and medical and hygiene facilities, as well as school facilities that could not be satisfactorily financed by voluntary contributions from local residents.89 In order to solve these problems, settlers in various treaty ports petitioned the government via local consuls, asking that the residents’ associations be legally incorporated and authorized to tax and raise money for local welfare projects.90 The settlers’ demands coalesced into a collective demand for the enactment of a local residents’ association law (kyoryumindanhd). During the Russo-Japanese War in late April 1904, three heads of the local residents’ associations from Mokp’o, In’chon, and Seoul met together and decided to petition at the next Imperial Assembly for the establishment of a system of settler self-government, based on the metropolitan system of local government.91 To defray the cost of public facilities, they also agreed to tax all Japanese residents, civilians as well as officials (including the consuls), except for the legation staff and military personnel.92 In addition, they discussed the issue of settler children, and planned to petition the Ministry of Education regarding the timely arrival of school textbooks before the

89 Duus, The Abacus, 359. 90 For instance, the Jinsen Residents’ Assembly submitted such a petition in September 1899. Jinsen-fu, Jinsen fushi, 170. 91 Ibid., 171. 92 Keijo Kyoryumindan, Keijo Hattasushi, 134; and Nakai Kinjo, Chosen kaikoroku, 122.

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beginning of each school term, the extension of the metropolitan system of additional pay for long service (nenko kaho), and so forth.93 Interestingly, the settler leaders also agreed to petition all local consuls in Korea concerning the regulation of settler manners (fugi). “Despite the status o f our country as an advanced nation,” they bemoaned, an increasing number of new comers to Korea exhibited “disgraceful behavior and unbearably barbaric appearance.” For instance, the Japanese bared their body in broad day light and hawked their merchandize by shamelessly walking on the streets with only a short dress and a hand towel around their head, looking “inferior to Koreans.” The leaders stressed the need to warn fellow Japanese residents to refrain from such abominable behavior by keeping them under strict social control.94 After much lobbying and with the support of the Foreign Ministry, in March 1905 the settlers finally managed to have the Diet pass the Residents’ Association Law, which recognized the existing associations as corporations under Japanese law.95 The new regulations inherited some of the earlier provisions while incorporating new ones. As before, a chief (mincho) of each resident association was to be elected by the resident association assembly (minkai) and approved by the Resident-General. The sphere o f authority of the mincho was broader than that of the metropolitan system in that he had the singular authority to convene or close the assembly, submit proposals, and preside over the discussion at the assembly. Males over twenty-five years of age who paid 5 yen or more in taxes had the right

93 Other items of request included the incorporation of overseas schools into the metropolitan Education Fund Law, and the annual inspection of overseas Japanese schools by officers from the Ministry of Education. Keijo Kyoryumindan, Keijo Hattasushi. 133. 94 Ibid., 134. 95 Tokanfu, Kankoku shisei nenpd, Meiji 39/40-nen (Keijo [Seoul]: Tokanfu, 1907), furoku, 12-13.

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to elect members of the local assembly (8-24 members), and, with the exception of public officials, teachers, and priests, the right to run for office as well.96 The association assembly was authorized to discuss and decide on proposals submitted by the chief concerning the association’s regulations, expenditures and budget, disposition of association’s real estate, property, and reserve funds, and law suits. In addition to handling their own assets, the residents’ associations managed the construction of public works including roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals, and levied their own taxes, user fees, and various labor duties such as cleaning of public facilities. During the protectorate period, Japanese residents in the eleven cities of Seoul, In’chon, Pusan, Kunsan, Chinnamp’o, P ’yongyang, Masan, Wonsan, Mokp’o, Taegu, and Sinuiju, each of which had one thousand or more settlers, managed their daily affairs through the residents’ associations more or less autonomously. Others huddled in smaller clusters in another dozen cities or large towns along the new trunk railroad lines, and formed Japanese clubs (Nihonjinkai) to conduct similar selfgoverning responsibilities. In the case of Seoul, most of the thirty seats in the residents’ association were dominated by pioneering merchants and entrepreneurs, such as Yamaguchi Tahee, Nakamura Saizo, and Wada Tsuneichi, who also led the chamber of commerce.97 The results for the election of the Seoul Residents Association in 1913 show that in addition to these pioneering merchants, a few journalists, entrepreneurs, a lawyer, and a doctor were also elected.98 It is

96 Ibid., 14. 97 Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, Keijo hattatsushi, 180; Kawabata, Keijo to naichijin, 56-57. 98 Omura Tomonojo, Keijo kaikoroku (Keijo: Chosen Kenkyukai, 1922), 103, 268. These new members included journalists such as Aoyagi Tsunataro and Makiyama Kozo, joumalist-tumed-businessmen such as Omura Momozo and Omura Tomonojo, Takahashi Shonosuke (lawyer), and Kudo Takejo (doctor).

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this eclectic group o f settler leaders who would lead the resident Japanese community for the next several decades. Each residents’ association also managed and financed the education of settler children. The first schools for Japanese children in Korea were built by the Buddhist missionaries of the Honganji (in In’chon in 1885, in Wonsan in 1888, and in Seoul in 1889)." As settlements expanded, however, schools came to be managed by the settlers themselves. In 1906-7, the Seoul Residents’ Association administered five primary schools, one kindergarten, and one women’s higher school.100 By the time o f annexation, Seoul had three large primary schools, which were bigger than most metropolitan schools and had an enrollment of over 3,000 pupils.101 Settler pioneers also founded and financially supported schools for settler children. Yamaguchi Tahee built the Hinode Primary School, which was primarily attended by children of bureaucrats and upper-class settlers.102 Wada Tsuneichi and Nakamura Saizo built a women’s higher school for Japanese females. Okakura Kihachiro built a commercial school, the Zenrin Commercial School, to provide vocational education for Koreans and settlers.

99 Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, Keijo Hattatsushi, 339. For more details on the role of the Honganji in building schools, see Otaniha Honganji Chosen Kaikyo Kantokubu, ed., Chosen kaikyo gojunenshi (Keijo [Seoul]: Otaniha Honganji Chosen Kaikyo Kantokubu, 1927), 149-160. 100 Tokanfu Somubu, ed., Kankoku jijdyoran, vol. 1 (Keijo [Seoul]: Keijo Nipposha, 1906-1907), 216-7. According to the recollection of a 1907 graduate from one o f these Japanese primary schools, settler children studied the Korean language as part of the curriculum for the purpose of “nikkan yuwa (harmony between Japan and Korea.” Hida Kaichi, “Omoide,” in Waga akarenga no manabisha: Keijo Hinode Shogakko hyakunenshi, ed. Keijo Hinodekai (Tokyo: Keijo Hinodekai, 1989), 84; “Hinode Shogakko gojunen o kataru zadankai,” in ibid., 54. 101 Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, Keijo Hattatsushi, 339-340. 102 Kawata Takeo, “Yamaguchi Tahee ou shoden,” in Waga akarenga, 47-50.

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The residents’ associations also managed hygiene and medical facilities. Maintenance of settler health was considered particularly important for the expansion o f Japanese influence in the colony and for the prevention of the spread of epidemics to the homeland. The residents’ association offered smallpox vaccination, created hygiene associations (eisei kumiai), invited doctors, built hospitals and wards, and quarantined patients with cholera. They also administered physical examinations of geisha and prostitutes for syphilis. And they formed fire brigades composed of carpenters and plasterers and entrusted to them the task of policing and regulating laborers.103 From its inception, however, the system of residents’ associations was subject to tight state control. The residents’ associations were placed under the authority of the ResidencyGeneral and each association under the vigilant supervision of his local representative, the rijikan (director-officer). All actions and decisions made by the local assembly, as well as all the expenditures of the residents’ association and other finer details of its fiscal and asset management, were subject to approval and supervision o f the rijikan.104 In 1908, settler autonomy was further curtailed by revisions in the existing regulations, which gave the Resident-General the power to appoint a chief of each association (mincho) and allowed public officials to run for posts in residents’ associations as well. The authorities apparently felt they needed to restrict the settlers’ autonomy lest the Koreans imitate the Japanese demand for self-rule.105

103 Kimura, Zaicho Nihonjin, 73. 104 He had the power to overrule any legislation passed by the assembly or election results deemed inappropriate and to regulate or dissolve the local assembly. 105 For the regulations on the residents’ associations, including the revisions made in 1908, see Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, ed., Keijo kyoryumindan kisoku ruishu (Keijo: Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, 1911), 1-15; Kimura, Zaicho Nihonjin, 78.

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The official decision to appoint the mincho provoked an outpouring of protest from the settler communities around the peninsula and vehement attacks by the local Japanese press.106 One after another the residents’ associations in Seoul, Pusan, Yongsan, Mokp’o, P’yongyang, and Chinnamp’o submitted a petition demanding that the authorities repeal their decision. The Seoul Residents’ Association criticized the official appointment of the mincho as tantamount to “nullifying over twenty years of the history o f Japanese settlers in Seoul” and creating “the cause of future conflict” between the mincho and the settler community.107 The Pusan residents claimed that the Western recognition of Japanese power in Korea was “owed to the advanced nature of Japanese self-management in Korea.” 108 When the authorities rejected the petition from the Seoul residents’ association, all o f its twenty members resigned in protest.109 The authorities pushed ahead with the revision nonetheless, but they also tried to appease the settler leaders by reappointing and in effect keeping many o f the incumbent mincho in their posts. The authorities explained that the official appointment of the mincho would reduce the cost of expenses for residents’ associations, increase administrative efficiency, and promote cooperation between officials and civilians.110 As we shall see,

106 “Mincho kansen ni taisuru zai-Kan kyoryumindan no sakebi,” Chosen (Chosen Zasshisha), September 1908, 4, 7-12. 107 Ibid., 7-8. 108 Quoted in Kimura, Zaicho Nihonjin, 79. 109 Himaraya Sanjin, “Mincho kansen mondai ni arawaretaru Keijo Kyoryumindan giin,” Chosen, September 1908, 43. 110

Kimura, Zaicho Nihonjin, 79; and Duus, The Abacus, 362.

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however, this tension between local residents and officials over the issue of settler autonomy would persist into the next decade and resurface after annexation.111

“Golden-Age” o f Settler Journalism under ltd The growth of settler community institutions was accompanied by the rise of vibrant local Japanese press. Journalists, who acted as settler opinion makers, aggressively defended Japanese expansionism, and increasingly articulated their own visions o f empire, which often surpassed that of metropolitan and local officials. The earliest Japanese-language papers in Korea were largely commercial papers, which first appeared in In’chon, Pusan, and Seoul in the 1880s. More full-fledged newspapers covering political affairs began to emerge in the 1890s and spread to other treaty port cities over time.112 The political role of newspapers in Japan’s expansion in Korea was most clearly demonstrated by the publishing activity o f the Kumamoto Kokkento (Kumamoto National Rights Party)—a patriotic political party founded in January 1889 by some shizoku in Kumamoto, who embraced the idea of expanding Japan’s national sovereignty based on the emperor-centered ideology.113 With the Sino-Japanese War as a

111 The growth o f settler communities in Korea was also promoted by the Chosen Kyokai (Korea Association), a non-partisan group formed in March 1902 by an eclectic group of Konoe Atsumaro’s aides such as Ogawa Heikichi, Kunitomo Shigeaki, Nakai Kitaro, and Mochizuki Ryutaro, entrepreneurs such as Shibusawa Eiichi and Okura Kihachiro, and scholars such as Tomizu Hiroto who advocated a war with Russia. The Chosen Kyokai viewed the settler community as a strategic foodhold for Japan’s expansion into Korea, advocated the construction of Korean railways, investigated the Korean currency problem, promoted the Japanese peddling activity in the interior, and petitioned the central government to allow the residents’ associations to incorporate in April 1902. In short, the Chosen Kyokai functioned as a kind of settler lobby in the metropole. The Chosen Kyokai was disbanded in March 1905 and merged into Toa Dobunkai. Chong Ae-yong, “Nisshin, nichiro sensoki no taigaiko undo to Nakai Kitaro,” Nihon Shokuminchi Kenkyu 11 (June 1999): 54, 59-62. 112 Yi Hae-ch’ang, Han ’guk sinmunsa. For a detailed study of the Chosen Shinpd, see Albert A. Altman, “Korea’s First Newspaper: The Japanese Chosen shinpo,” Journal o f Asian Studies 43, no. 4 (August 1984): 685-696. 113 Sasa Hiroo, “Kumamoto Kokkento to Chosen ni okeru shinbun jigyS,” Kokushikan Daigaku Jinbungakkai Kiyo 9 (1977): 21-22.

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turning point, the Kumamoto Kokkento embarked on publishing activity in Korea as a means of reforming and guiding Korea under Japan’s tutelage, departing from its earlier call for a voluntary union of independent East Asian nations. In 1894, Adachi Kenzo, who would later inherit the party leadership from Sasa Yubo, began the publication of the party’s first paper, the Chosen Jihd, which became the forerunner of the periodical press in Korea. With the support of the Japanese minister Inoue Kaoru, Adachi also began the publication of the Kanjo Shinpo in Seoul in February 1895. Because the paper was created by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ discretionary fund and supported by its monthly subsidy, the Kanjo Shinpo had the character of a ministry’s bulletin.114 It was also the first bilingual (Korean and Japanese) newspaper in Korea. From its company employees down to factory workers at the printing press, the Kanjo Shinpo was completely run by members of the Kumamoto Kokkento, and placed under the presidency of Adachi and the chief editor, Kunitomo Shigeaki, who was a brother-in-law of Sasa Yubo. The paper quickly gained popularity among well-do-do Koreans, gaining about 400 readers. The minister Inoue hoped to use the paper particularly as a means of winning the cooperation and understanding of the Korean court.115 By 1905, there were altogether fourteen Japanese newspapers in Korea—two in In’chon and in Taegu, three in Pusan and in Seoul, and one each in Mokp’o, Wonsan, Chinnamp’o, and P’yongyang.116 They served multiple roles as the political voice of local

114 Ibid., 29. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also extended financial support to other Japanese papers via local consulates, in order to bring them fully in line with the expansionist policy of the Japanese government. Yi Hae-ch’ang, Han ’guk sinmunsa, 298-9. 115 Sasa Hiroo, “Kumamoto Kokkento,” 32-33. 116 Sakurai Yoshiyuki, “Kankoku jidai no hoji shinbun,” Shomotsu Dokokai kaiho (Keijo Shomotsu Dokokai) 14 (1941): 11. The number of papers continued to rise: by the end of the protectorate period, there were eight dailies, three weeklies, and three monthly magazines in Seoul, four dailies each in Mokp’o

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Japanese residents, as a public forum for discussion on Korean affairs, and as a liaison between settlers and the ruling authorities. At the same time, the local Japanese press tirelessly enjoined settlers and officials to maintain dignity and “self-awareness” as “members of a superior civilized nation,” and alerted them to their “duty to develop Korea and enlighten the Koreans.”117 The Japanese protectorate government also created the Keijo Nippo and its English version, the Seoul Press, and used them to promote its policies.118 Before the protectorate period, no central legal apparatus of press control existed. As such, the kenpei police or the rijikan regulated the press almost at will, even by expelling journalists who launched personal attacks on his policy.119 Resident-General Ito Hirobumi (1905-1909) ended such ad hoc suppression of the press. By giving local Japanese papers financial support and loosely applying the metropolitan Newspaper Law (enacted in April 1908), the authorities sought to forestall potential settler criticism o f Korean policy and exploit the press for political propaganda.120 This relaxed and flexible censorship control allowed settler (and to some extent Korean) media to flourish, ushering in the “golden age” of settler journalism in Korea.

and in W5nsan, two dailies and one magazine in Pusan, and one or two dailies in other cities. Chosen Sotokufu, Dai-yonji Chosen Sotokufu tokei nenpo (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Sotokufu, 1911), 240-241. 117 Shakuo Kyokuho, “Chosen ni okeru Nihonjin,” Chosen (Chosen Zasshisha), May 1908, 27-28. 118 The Keijo Nippo was created in 1906 by Ito’s discretionary fund, which took over and merged the Kanjo Shinpo and the Daito Shinpo (a bilingual newspaper founded by Kikuchi Kenjo in 1900). Shibazaki Rikie, “Tokutomi Soho to Keijo Nippo,” 66; Yi Hae-ch’ang, Han ‘guk sinmunsa, 306. 119 The first journalist to be expelled from Korea was the president of the Taikyu Nippo in Taegu, who criticized the rijikan's policy toward Japanese residents in April 1908. Kim Kyu-hwan, “Shokuminchi ka Chosen ni okeru genron oyobi genron seisaku shi” (PhD diss., University o f Tokyo, 1959), 89-90. 120 Yi Hae-ch’ang, Han ’guk sinmunsa, 298-299.

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Settler papers often took advantage o f Ito’s relatively hands-off attitudes toward the press to argue for a more hawkish policy toward Korea. In its first issue published on the Emperor’s Birthday on November 3, 1907, the Keijo Shinpo, founded by Kikuchi Kenjo and Minegishi Shigetaro, urged the officials to go beyond the establishment of protectorate rule and bring the peninsula fully under Japanese control by “advancing [Japanese] power on this peninsula” and “implanting [Japanese] culture.” 121 Similarly, Shakuo Shunjo through his magazine Chosen argued that Ito “should have also gained the right to [Korea’s] internal government” at the conclusion of the protectorate treaty.122 Such jingoism also led the settler journalists to castigate Ito’s “weak-kneed” policy, resulting in bans and suspension orders when their feisty spirit o f criticism went a bit too far. The Keijo Shinpo was particularly known for its relentless attack on Ito’s “soft” and “conciliatory” policy toward Korea “modeled on Lord Cromer’s policy in Egypt.” The paper even went so far as to claim that Ito was “unfit for the Resident-General” (April 10, 1908), and demand that his rule be replaced with “military rule (budan seiji)” (June 4, 1908).123 Not surprisingly, the Keijo Shinpo was frequently suspended,124 but the editor’s opinion was widely shared by the settler community. As another newspaper noted, local Japanese residents, from journalists down to school children, expressed joy rather than regret over the

121 Kim Kyu-hwan, “Shokuminchi ka Chosen,” 85-86. 122 Kyokuho, “Ito-ko no tokan seiji to Kankoku no genjo,” Chosen, January 1909, 31-36. 123 Kim Kyu-hwan, “Shokuminchi ka Chosen,” 86. 124 Among the most serious punishments in this period was a two-week suspension order on the Keijo Shinpo. The paper carried an article (dated June 24, 1908) that lambasted the policy of Yi Wan-yong, Ito’s most trusted Korean Prime Minister, and demanded his resignation, which was taken as a direct attack on Ito’s policy. Ibid., 89.

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news o f the resignation of Ito, whose “Korea-centered policy” had bred much settler discontent.125 The authorities also kept their eyes open for articles that disclosed information on the movements of the army or the kenpeitai mobilized for quelling rebellions in the provinces.126 For instance, one article in the Keijo Shinpo in December 1907 presented a rather feeble picture of “the police and the kenpeitai (gendarmerie) not knowing how to handle the rebels” and “asking for more troops.”127 They banned such articles which could not only jeopardize the officials’ secret plans, but accidentally expose imperfections in the ruling structure. Even tighter regulations based on pre-publication censorship and stricter punishments were applied to the Korean vernacular press by the Newspaper Law of July 1907, which aimed at suppressing the anti-Japanese press. But the settlers’ real struggle for free speech began after Sone Arasuke succeeded Ito as the Korean Resident-General in 1909. Sone revised the existing Newspaper Regulations in August 1909, changing the reporting-system to a licensing system, doubling the amount of required security money, and adding detailed regulations on editing. The revised regulations were also applied to all newspapers imported into Korea. In May 1910, the Keijo Kishadan (Keijo Journalists’ Group), composed of leading Japanese journalists in Seoul, passed a resolution denouncing the local officials’ “abuse of authority” and demanding a revision in the newspaper regulations, but their voices were not heard.128 The appointment of Terauchi

125 A Jiji Hyoron’s article is reprinted in Shiryo zasshi ni miru kindai Nihon no Chosen ninshiki: Kankoku heigoki zengo, vol. 3 (Tokan seijiki: ge), ed. Kum Pybng-dong (Tokyo: Ryokuin Shobo, 1999), 150-1. 126 Gamou Daimu, “Chosen no shinbunkai junen no kaiko,” Chosen oyobi Manshu (Chosen oyobi Manshusha) April 1917, 81. 127 Kim Kyu-hwan, “Shokuminchi ka Chosen,” 86. 128 Keijo Shinpo, May 25, 1910.

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Masatake as a successor to Sone (June 1910) and as the new governor-general of Korea (September) brought even more gloom to local journalists. His thoroughgoing suppression of the local press led to the virtual disappearance of Korean-language papers. Even the publication of the officially patronized Keijo Nippo and the Seoul Press was occasionally suspended.129 Other newspapers incurred bans on the publication and circulation of articles on a daily basis. Between August 20 and 25, almost all metropolitan newspapers had their articles confiscated by the Resident-General and provincial police authorities: on August 24 alone, as many as thirteen metropolitan papers were confiscated by the police authorities in North Kydngsang, Kangwon, and North Ch’ungchong Provinces.130 During this period, the Chosen Nichinichi Shinbun and three other papers were abolished or bought by the Residency-General.131 Contrary to settlers’ expectations that the existing control on the freedom of press would be lifted after annexation, they would face even harsher control under Terauchi’s military rule, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

Japanese Teachers Along with journalists and ultranationalists, Japanese teachers also actively promoted the expansion of Japanese hegemony in Korea. Some journalists, such as Shakuo Shunjo and Aoyagi Tsunataro, actually began their career in Korea as Japanese-language teachers. The Korean study of the Japanese language increased in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War, and mushroomed after the Russo-Japanese War. The latter war in particular created a large demand for Japanese language interpreters to accompany the huge number of Japanese troops 129 Kye Hun-mo, ed., Han 'guk ollonydnp 'yo (Seoul: Kwanhun K ’lillop Sinyong Yon’gu Kigum, 1979), 197, 203; and Chosen, July 1910, 115. 130 Ibid., 209-210. 131 Kim Kyu-hwan, “Shokuminchi ka Chosen,” 91.

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stationed in Korea. This led to a rapid growth o f Japanese language schools, bringing about “a Japanese language boom” in Korea. The Korean government and private Japanese educational institutions—notably, the Dai-Nihon Kaigai Kyoikukai (Great Japan Overseas Education Association), the Toa Dobunkai (East Asia Common Culture Society),132 and the Higashi Honganji—spearheaded the creation of Japanese-language schools in Korea.133 Various Korean patriotic enlightenment organizations also built their own Japanese-language schools. For instance, the Ilchinhoe managed one Japanese school in Seoul, and recmited Japanese teachers from the nearby Keijo Middle School and affiliates of the Kokuryukai.134 Some settlers, including members of the Kumamoto Kokkento, also established their own language schools. By the end of the protectorate period, there were over 130 Japanese-language schools in Korea, mostly targeted at Korean youth.135 The schools offered classes in Japanese conversation and essay composition, and over time gradually added other “modem” subjects to the curriculum, such as “Westem-style legal 132 The Toa Dobunkai was set up in November 1898 for the purpose o f “preservation o f China.” It expanded its activities to Korea, which included the publication o f newspapers and the management or support of Japanese language schools in P’yongyang and other cities. See Inaba Tsugio, Kyu Kanmatsu “Nichigo gakko ” no kenkyu (Fukuoka: Kyushu Daigaku Shuppankai, 1997), 271. 133 Local Korean notables also built Japanese-language schools or Korean schools which offered Japanese language education. Scholars have conventionally held that modern education in Korea was established in the late Chosen period by official schools, Christian-run private schools, and nationalistic private schools. But Inaba Tsugio argues that the role of Japanese-language schools must not be ignored in this period. See ibid. for a comprehensive study on the Japanese-language schools in late Chosen period. 1j4 Nagashima Hiroki, “Isshinkai no nichigo gakko,” Bunmei no kurosu rodo: Museum Kyushu 15, no.l (March 1997): 61-66; Nagashima, “Isshinkai ritsu ‘Kobu gakko’ ko,” Chosen Gakuho 178 (January 2001): 141-180. 135 Inaba Tsugio, Kyu Kankoku no kyoiku to Nihonjin (Fukuoka: Kyushud Daigaku Shuppankai, 1999), 221. There were altogether 164 Japanese teachers and school employees who were officially hired by the Korean government under the protectorate rule. O f these Japanese, 93 were normal school teachers and roughly half of them stayed in Korea after annexation, mostly becoming principals o f officially established normal schools. Ibid., 234-239.

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system, bureaucracy, thought, and literature.”136 Like the journalists, many teachers at these Japanese-language schools had a strong kokushi (patriot) character and a sense o f mission to inculcate Korean youth in Japanese culture, seeking to spread modernity as well as “proJapanese” ideology. One example was Ayukai Fusanoshin (1864-1946). Having studied the Korean language at the Tokyo Foreign Languages School, in 1894 Ayukai came to Korea to start an “educational project” at the invitation of his former classmates, Kokubun Shotaro and Shiokawa Ichitaro who were working as interpreters for the Japanese legation at the time.137 After obtaining permission and financial support from the Korean government, Ayukai established the Otsumatsu Gijuku in the spring of 1895. Yosano Tekkan also taught with Ayukai at the Otsumatsu Gijuku before marrying Yosano Akiko in 1901. Like the Kumamoto Kokkento’s schools, the Otsumatsu Gijuku aimed to educate Korean youth through Japanese and normal school curriculum as a means of “transplanting Japanese culture” in Korea.138 Both Ayukai and Yosano also participated in the assassination of Queen Min, by “carrying the Taewon’gun out” of the palace, for the pressing reason that the Min faction had threatened to requisition the Otsumatsu Gijuku.139 Ayukai cultivated close relationships with Korean government officials, especially Kim Yun-sik who served as the minister o f foreign

136 Nagashima Hiroki, “Isshinkai ritsu ‘Kobu gakko’ ko,” 167. 137 Inaba Tsugio, Kyu Kankoku, 253. 138 Ibid., 254, 257. 139 While Yosano was sent to Hiroshima along with others privy to the incident, Ayukai managed to escape the punishment for he had fled to Mokp’o. But this inevitably led to the closure of his school, less than a year after its creation.

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affairs in the short-lived Kim Hong-jip cabinet before he was expelled to the Cheju Island for his involvement in the Queen Min incident.140 Another Japanese teacher was Okumura Ioko, the founder o f the Patriotic Women’s Association. Her family’s connections to Korea went back as far as the late sixteenth century, when her ancestor went to Pusan in 1585 to open a temple for propagating Japanese Buddhism.141 About three hundred years later, the chief priest Okumura Enshin spearheaded the Japanese Buddhist missionary activity in Korea by opening branch temples of Higashi Honganji in Pusan (1877), Wonsan (1881), and In’chSn (1885). When Enshin returned to the peninsula for his second round of missionary activity, this time to work independently from the Higashi Honganji, he brought his younger sister Ioko with him. Their objective was three-fold: to promote the development o f industry, to set up a school to “enlighten youth,” and to encourage locally influential individuals to visit Japan as a means o f spreading Buddhism among the broader Korean public.142 In 1898, the Okumuras, accompanied by supporters from home, opened a vocational school in Kwangju with the aid of Konoe Atsumaro. The school’s curriculum centered on agriculture and silkworm rearing, while Ioko and other teachers went around offering technical guidance to local Korean farmers’ families.143 They also taught Japanese at school, apparently in anticipation of Japan’s future annexation of Korea and out of their conviction that Koreans would

140Ayukai Fusanoshin, “Kaikodan,” Shomotsu Dokokai Kaihd 17 (September 1942): 3; and Imamura Raen, “Kin In Shoku [Kim Yun-sik] shi to Ayukai ou to no k5jo,” ibid.: 315. Kim Yun-sik was one of many “proJapanese” Korean aristocrats who later joined the March First Movement. 141 Inaba, Kyu Kanlcoku, 266. 142 Aikoku fujinkai, Okumura Ioko shoden, 149-150 143 Ibid., 161-163.

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“ultimately become our comrades.”144 In spite of their enthusiasm, however, their attempt to construct the school and a “Japanese village” in Kwangju met local Korean resistance and ultimately ended in failure.145 A more successful example of settler educational venture is Fuchizawa Noe, a prominent Japanese female educator. Having traveled and studied English in the United States in her early thirties, she entered the Doshisha Women’s School in Kyoto. After quitting school in 1885, she taught at women’s schools in Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Kumamoto, and in 1895 opened a women’s academy in Tokyo. With a new determination to begin educational work in Korea, in 1905 Fuchizawa moved to Seoul and established, with Yi Chong-suk, Myongchin Women’s School (renamed Sungmyong Women’s Higher Normal school in 1911) for upper-class Korean women.146 Like many Japanese female teachers invited to Korea in this period, Fuchizawa argued for the importance o f female education, and sought to foster greater awareness of this need among parents and the general public.147 Fuchizawa also aimed to socialize Korean aristocratic women by bringing them out into the public and introducing male teachers into the classroom against the Korean traditional custom.

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In the fall of 1906, with the support of the Yi royal family and other prominent figures, Fuchizawa also founded the Nikkan Fujinkai (Japanese-Korean Women’s Society) in 144 Inaba, Kyu Kankoku, 270. 145 Aikoku fujinkai, Okumura Ioko shoden, 146, 154. 146 Nakamura Shiryo, ed., Keijo Jinsen shokugyd meikan (Keijo [Seoul]: Toa Keizai Jihosha, 1926), 299. 147 Song Y6n-ok, “Heikyo eno josei jinko ido,” 78. 148 Ichi kisha, “Ch5sen fujin kaihatsujo wasurete wa naranu Nihon joryu kyoikuka Fuchizawa Noeko joshi,” Chosen Koron, September 1914, 68-69; Ichikisha, “Katsudo no fajin,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, April 1914, 190-191.

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order to promote social interaction and harmony between wives o f Japanese officials and Korean yangban aristocratic women.149 Through her educational ventures targeted at upperclass Korean women, Fuchizawa aimed to reform Korea’s “old corrupt customs” in housing, cooking, and marriage, and to promote the Japanization of Korean lifestyle overall.150 From April 1907, she also engaged in social work as an executive member of the Patriotic Women’s Association and as the chairman of the Women’s Temperance Society (Fujin Kyofukai). Fuchizawa devoted the rest of her life to the education o f Korean women and the training of Korean female teachers.151 These settlers’ educational initiatives laid the foundation for Japanese colonial education in Korea, before the state became the main agent in training and sending Japanese teachers to Korea from late 1905 onward. After the annexation of Korea and the establishment of officially-run schools, private Japanese-language schools lost their raison d’etre and all but disappeared.152 But, as we shall see, educational pioneers like Ayukai and Fuchizawa remained in Korea and continued to play an influential role.

Settler Advisors in the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement Japan further tightened its political hold over Korea by pressuring the Korean cabinet under Yi Wan-yong to sign a new protectorate treaty in July 1907. The treaty allowed Japan to assume full control over Korea’s internal administrative affairs and achieve “a de facto 149 Morikawa Kiyoto, ed., Chosen Sotokufu shisei nijugoshunen kinen hyoshosha meikan (Keijo [Seoul]: Hyoshosha Meikan Kankokai, 1935), 930. 150 Ichikisha, “Katsudo no fujin,” 191. 1MThe student enrollment steadily increased, from a mere five in 1905 to over 300 in 1914, and to about 550 by the mid-1930s. Ichi kisha, “Chosen fujin kaihatsujo wasurete wa naranu Nihon joryu kyoikuka Fuchizawa Noeko joshi,” Chosen Koron, September 1914, 69; Morikawa, Chosen Sotokufu, 930. 152 Japanese teachers in Korea became “government officials” in January 1908. Inaba, Kyu Kankoku, 286.

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annexation.”153 As a result, foreign advisors to the Korean government became almost exclusively Japanese, while provincial bureaucratic posts also came to be filled by Japanese nationals. Ito adopted a “policy of nurturing self-rule” by implementing a variety of reforms, such as the creation of a new legal and judicial system, uniform currency, a central bank, and agricultural stations. However, these reforms met with anti-Japanese resistance from the Min faction and conservative Confucian scholars. A wave of local protests also rose against tax collection, a decree to cut off the top-knot, and the disbanding o f the traditional army, which culminated in the rise of uibyong (righteous armies) in December 1907. While the protectorate government was engaged in a protracted battle to crush these local guerrilla forces, some settlers linked up with Korean reformist leaders to further promote Korea’s self-strengthening effort. Following the demise of the Independence Club in 1898, a diverse array of political, labor, and scholarly organizations emerged to continue the nationalistic struggle that came to be collectively known as the “Patriotic Enlightenment Movement.” Since public political assembly was outlawed by the protectorate government, these organizations worked toward the goal o f independence by fostering mass national consciousness, spreading education, and promoting the growth of native industry for Korea’s economic self-sufficiency.154 Among the largest political organizations were the Ilchinhoe, the Taehan Changanghoe (later Taehan Hyophoe), and the Sobuk Hakhoe, all of which had some Japanese settler advisors. The Ilchinhoe (Advancement Society), founded in August 1904 and

153 Duus, The Abacus and the Sword, 219. 154 For instance, in 1907, the Association for Redemption of the National Debt launched a mass campaign, aided by the vernacular press, to repay the foreign debt, mostly to Japan, and recover Korea’s financial independence. In the same year, the New People’s Association (Sinminhoe) was secretly formed to foster Korean education and prepare Korea for an armed struggle.

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led by Song Pyong-jun and Yi Yong-gu, was arguably the first mass political organization in Korea.155 Mainly composed of manual laborers, the Ilchinhoe’s membership once reached 800,000 members in 1908, but it had dwindled to 140,715 by the time of its dissolution in 1910.156 The Ilchinhoe aimed to reform Korean society based on the following five objectives: national independence and respect for the throne; governmental reform; the reorganization of financial and military systems; the protection of the life and property o f people; and assistance to Japan as an “ally” of Korea in her military operations against Russia.157 Most notably, the Ilchinhoe members offered their labor for the construction of the Seoul-Uiju Line which “contributed to [Japan’s] victory over the Russo-Japanese War.”158 The Ilchinhoe was marked by a strong undercurrent o f Pan-Asian sentiment and antiWesternism, echoing the anti-Christian tones of the Tonghak movement. Yi Yong-gu had been influenced by the “peoples rights group” (minkensha) in Japan who wanted the

155 A partial offshoot of the Tonghak peasant movement, the Ilchinhoe came into being in August 1904, when Yi Yong-gu (1868-1912)’s Chinbo-hoe and another reformist group, Yushin-hoe (the Renovation Society) composed of former members o f the Independence Club, merged into one body. There are two brief histories of the Ilchinhoe published around the time of annexation. See Keijo Kenpeibuntai, ed. Isshinkai ryakushi (Keijo [Seoul], 1910); and Yi In-sop, Han ’guk Ilchinhoe yoks a (Keijo [Seoul], 1911). For a detailed study on the Ilchinhoe in English, see Vipan Chandra, “An Outline Study of the Ilchin-hoe (Advancement Society) of Korea,” Occasional Papers on Korea 2 (1974): 43-72. There are many Japanese-language articles on the Ilchinhoe: Hayashi Yusuke, “Isshinkai no zenhanki ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyu: 1906 nen 8 gatsu made,” in Chosen shakai no shiteki tenkai to Higashi Ajia, ed. Takeda Yukio (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1997), 494-526; Hayashi Yusuke, “Isshinkai no kohanki ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyu: 1906 nen 8 gatsu-kaisan,” Toyo Bunka Kenkyu (Gakushuin Daigaku, Toyo Bunka Kenkyujo) 1 (March 1999): 265-296; Hayashi Yusuke, “Undo dantai to shite no Isshinkai: minshu tono sesshoku yoso o chushin ni,” Chosen Gakuho 172 (July 1999): 43-67; Nagashima Hiroki, “Isshinkai no katsudo to sono tenkai,” Nenpo Chosengaku (Kyushu Daigaku Chosengaku Kenkyukai) 5 (July 1995): 6186; and Kim Tong-my6ng, “Isshinkai to Nihon: ‘seigoho’ to heigo,” Chosenshi Kenkyukai Ronbunshu 31 (October 1993): 97-126. 156 Gaimusho, ed., Nihon gaiko monjo, vol. 41, no. 1 (1908; repr., Tokyo: Nihon Kokusai Rengo Kyokai, 1960), 854-855; Chandra, “An Outline Study,” 52. 157 Chandra, “An Outline Study,” 43-72. 158 Sase Kumatetsu, “Isshinkai to Togakuto,” in Kyoryumin no mukashi monogatari, vol. 1, ed. Fujimura Tokuichi (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Futamukashikai, 1927), 71.

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nationalists of Japan, China, and Korea to combat the Western threat in a united Asian alliance under Japanese leadership.159 Under the leadership of Song Pyong-jun, the organization acquired a more explicitly “pro-Japanese” character, as it also came to be supervised by the Kokuryukai leaders, namely Toyama Mitsuru and Uchida Ryohei. Settler ronin such as Sugi Ichirobei and Sase Kumatetsu160 and journalists such as Kikuchi Kenjo, who had participated in the assassination of Queen Min, also supported the Ilchinhoe when they returned to Korea. The overtly pro-Japanese orientation of the Ilchinhoe provoked criticism from other Korean organizations. The Taehan Changanghoe (later Taehan Hyophoe [Great Korea Association]) emerged as the biggest rival of the Ilchinhoe. Formed in the spring o f 1906 and led by Yun Ch’i-ho, Chang Chi-yon, and Yun Hyo-j5ng, the Taehan Changanghoe aimed to promote the twin objectives of education and economic development, while countering the pro-Japanese activity of the Ilchinhoe.161 Like the Ilchinhoe, the Taehan Hyophoe

159 The members were particularly influenced by the views of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nakamura Masanao, and other Meiji enlightenment thinkers with whom some of them studied in Japan, as well as Toyama Mitsuru’s Pan-Asianism. Vipan Chandra, Imperialism, Resistance, and reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Korea : Enlightenment and the Independence Club (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1988), 40-47. 160 Sase Kumatstsu worked as a doctor in the Korean government from 1894 until he was deported to Hiroshima in 1895. Sase secretly reentered Korea with his comrades in July 1897 to assist the maneuvers of the pro-Japanese Korean faction in Seoul, but he was once again ordered to leave Korea. He was subsequently elected to the House of Representatives from his home prefecture o f Fukushima in August 1902, and became a member of the Kensei Honto. But stirred by the outbreak o f the Russo-Japanese War, Sase went back to Korea with a determination to “bury bones in Korea,” and assisted Song Py5ng-jun, Yun Si-byong, and Yi Yong-gu in running the Ilchinhoe as its advisor. Kokuryukai, Toa senkaku shishi kiden, ge-kan, 635-6. Before he became involved in the Ilchinhoe, Sase had also served as an advisor to the Tongnip-dang (Independence Party) or Kaehwa-dang (Enlightenment Party) composed o f progressive reformists and would-be members of the Independence Club. Sase, “Isshinkai to Togakuto,” 69. 161 See “Chang Chiyon and others: Manifesto of the Korean Association for Self-Strengthening [From Imperial Capital News, 2 April 1906]” in Sourcebook o f Korean Civilization, vol. 2: From the Seventeenth Century to the Modem Period, ed. Peter H. Lee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 415-6. In 1906 when the organization proposed the creation of a system of compulsory education, the ResidencyGeneral vetoed the plan tentatively approved by the Korean government. Ibid., 412. For its conflict with the Ilchinhoe, see Keij5 Kenpeibuntai, Isshinkai ryakushi, 22-32.

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emphasized the protection of life and property, and called for administrative reforms and for an end to bureaucratic corruption, but it also sought to “promote new Westem-style learning and industry” and “publicize the modem concepts of rights, obligations, responsibility, and civic disobedience.”162 Although the Taehan Hyophoe was the second largest organization, its membership was much smaller than that of the Ilchinhoe: it totaled about 2,000 in 1908 and increased to about 7,400 by 1910.163 Interestingly, the Taehan Hyophoe also had some Japanese “supporting members,” including an influential settler journalist, Ogaki Takeo.164 Ogaki had been politically active since a young age, and had served as editor of newspapers in various cities before he came to Korea. Already in his forties when he was “brought to Korea by Ito,” Ogaki became an advisor to the Taehan Changanghoe immediately after his arrival in 1906. He aided in its effort to counter the dominance of the Ilchinhoe which had a new official supervisor, Uchida Ryohei. In addition to Ogaki, Saeki Gohei (lawyer)165 and Shiga Yugoro166 also became supporting members of the Taehan Hyophoe. Ogaki was in charge of the publication of the organization’s newspaper, the Taehan Minbo (Great Korea People’s Daily), which he began in 1909. Ogaki continued to serve in a

162 Lee, Sourcebook o f Korean Civilization, 412. 163 Gaimusho, Nihon gaiko monjo, vol. 41, 854-855; C.I. Eugene Kim and Han-Kyo Kim, Korea and the Politics o f Imperialism, 180. 164 For a detailed study on Ogaki Takeo’s involvement in the Taehan Hyophoe, see Ikegawa Hidekatsu, “Ogaki Takeo no kenkyu: Daikan Jikyokai tono kanren o chushin ni shite,” Chosen Gakuho 117 (October 1985): 525-567; and Ikegawa, “Ogaki Takeo ni tsuite,” ibid. 119/120 (July 1986): 65-84. 165 For a study of Saeki Gohei’s role in the Korean organizations in this period, see Ikegawa, “Daikan teikoku makki,” 35-128. 166 Shiga had accompanied the consul Inoue Kaoru as a correspondent for the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun and later joined the Kokuryukai Kokuryukai. Toa senkaku shishi kiden, ge-kan, 690.

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similar capacity after the organization was ordered to disband and restructured as the Taehan Hyophoe a few months later in November 1907.167 A kenpeitai police report shows that Ogaki overcame reservations of Resident-General Ito about the formation of political parties in Korea, and assisted members o f the disbanded Taehan Changanghoe in forming the Taehan Hyophoe.168 However, Ito still obstructed the organization’s effort to recruit new members by prohibiting the creation of its office and a place for membership registration.169 There were also regional organizations that primarily aimed to promote educational and scholarly discourse on Korean self-strengthening. Among the most influential was the Sobuk Hakhoe (West-Northern Scholarly Association) founded in 1907 and headed by Chong Un-bok.170 It was an educational organization composed mainly of scholars from P’yongyang who desired to spread education among the masses, but also harbored strong political ambitions and anti-govemmental sentiment.171 Its Japanese advisor was Takahashi Shonosuke, a prominent settler and a lawyer. Takahashi had been elected to the Diet in 1903, and having lost the following year’s election came to Korea and began his legal practice in Seoul in 1905.

167 This time Ogaki became a “supporting member” rather than an advisor. Ikegawa Hidekatsu, “Daikan teikoku makki kakudantai ni mirareru Nihonjin komon ni tsuite: Saeki Gohei,” Chosen Gakuho 158 (January 1996): 120. For the founding prospectus, membership, and aims of the Taehan Hyophoe. see Taehan Hyophoe, ed., Taehan Hyophoe (Keijo [Seoul], 1907). For studies on the activities of the Taehan Hyophoe, see, for instance, Yi Hyon-jong, “Taehan Hydphoe e kwanhan yon’gu,” Asea Yon ’gu (Koryo Taehakkyo Asea Munje Yon’guso)13, no. 3 (1970): 17-56; and Kim Hang-gu, “Taehan Hydphoe ui chongch’i hwaltong yon’gu,” 7b«gsb.sa/za&(Han’gukTongsb Sahakhoe) 5, no. 1 (1999): 183-212. 168 Kankoku Chusatsu Kenpeitai Shireibu, ed., Daikan Kyokaishi (Keijo [Seoul], July 1910). 169 Ikegawa, “Daikan teikoku makki,” 121. 170 Sugimoto Masasuke and Oda Shogo, eds., Chosenshi taikei: saikinseishi (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosenshi Gakkai, 1927), 202. Chdng Un-bok served as the chief editor of the Maeil Sinbo during the colonial period. 171 Gaimusho, Nihon gaiko monjo, vol. 41, no. 1, 854.

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Moreover, Ogaki and Takahashi concurrently served as advisors to the Taehan Sillop Hyophoe, which was founded in 1908 and headed by Yi Chi-ho, Min Yong-gi, and Min Won-sik. The organization had the twin objectives of developing Korean enterprise and promoting national self-strengthening.172 A few smaller-scale organizations, especially commercial organizations, had one or two Japanese advisors as well. This trend o f placing Japanese advisors, whether in government or in self-strengthening organizations, was also noted by the Taehan Maeil Sinbo (Korea Daily News), a leading Korean daily, albeit with much lament.173 While the involvement of home island-based Uchida and other ultranationalists in the Ilchinhoe is well-known, little is known about the role of settler advisors in Korean self­ strengthening organizations. How and why did the settlers become involved in these organizations? First of all, the Korean reformists shared with the Japanese advisors a broad Pan-Asianist vision of reform based on the Meiji model. All of these settler advisors had also been actively involved in the popular rights movement in Japan, and shared a liberalist vision that welded constitutionalism at home and imperialism abroad.174 It appears that they hoped to develop these Korean organizations to the level of Japanese or Western political parties.175 Such political ambitions and joint activity of Korean leaders and settler advisors often ran counter to the policy of the Residency-General. For instance, a group o f Japanese advisors to these Korean organizations launched a petition campaign to release Pak Yong172 Ibid., 855. 173 Taehan Maeil Sinbo, March 20, 1907. 174 Ikegawa, “Daikan teikoku,” 114. 175 Ibid., 120-121. For instance, speaking to the Taehan Hyophoe members, Saeki expressed his hope to develop the organization in this direction by quoting the examples of Western political parties and straggles between the Kensei Honto and the Seiyukai and the Daido Kurabu in Japan.

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hyo, who was arrested and exiled to Cheju Island for an attempted coup to assassinate the cabinet ministers at King Kojong’s abdication ceremony in July 1907.176 Interestingly, their action was also condemned by one settler newspaper, the Chosen Times, which denounced the campaign as “a big conspiracy of a Japanese and Korean admixture” and “national traitors” scheming to overthrow the existing Korean government and dispose of the Japanese protectorate rule.177 On the other hand, Ito sought to use the Ilchinhoe through Uchida Ryohei, who became a part-time employee (shokutaku) of the Residency-General in 1905, for building a collaborative structure with “pro-Japanese” Koreans to bring the Korean cabinet under Japanese control. Nonetheless, the Japanese government began to cut ties to the ultranationalist and unruly ronin elements once the framework o f Japanese rule over Korea had been built. The Japanese also became increasingly wary o f the political ambitions of the Ilchinhoe leaders, especially Song Pyong-jun who desired to assume control over the Korean cabinet. The ideological landscape of late Choson Korea was indeed complex: it gave rise to alliances between Korean reformers and settler political aspirants, while generating tension with the ruling authorities and internal disagreements among the settler intelligentsia. Such tension and divisions deepened in the months leading to the annexation of Korea. As Ito’s gradualist policy reached a dead end, leading to his resignation in June 1909, the Ilchinhoe, the Taehan Hyophoe, and some leaders of the Sobuk Hakhoe began to ponder ways of bridging their differences and working together on the goal of self-strengthening. Based on the idea of a united front among the three organizations, in September 1909 Yi Yong-gu launched an anti-cabinet campaign to regain control over the government for “the 176 Ibid., 115-118; Duus, The Abacus, 209-210. 177 Ikegawa, “Daikan teikoku,” 117.

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promotion of our state’s welfare” and “rescuing our people from misery.”178 Although the Sobuk Hakhoe refused to join this coalition for reasons of “non-intervention in politics,” the Ilchinhoe and the Taehan Hyophoe proceeded with the plan for alliance up until early December. But their cooperation broke down when the Ilchinhoe leaders proposed a joint petition movement to expedite the Japanese political absorption of Korea. Although such an idea was immediately rebuffed by the Taehan Hyophoe, the Ilchinhoe leaders moved ahead with the plan.179 Seeing the October 1909 assassination of Ito, who had been reluctant about the idea of outright annexation, as an opportune moment,180 Uchida Ryohei quickly moved to prepare the Ilchinhoe for the petition campaign, with the support o f hardliners like War Minister Terauchi and Ogawa Heikichi in Tokyo. On December 4, the Ilchinhoe submitted a memorial to King Sunjong and petitions to Prime Minister Yi Wang-yong and new ResidentGeneral Sone Arasuke, asking for the abdication o f the monarch and a “political merger (,seigappo)” of Korea and Japan. Although Sone was equally skeptical of the Ilchinhoe, he ultimately accepted the petition when it was submitted for the fourth time.181 Shocked and outraged by the Ilchinhoe’s move, the city of Seoul exploded in protest. On the following day, the Taehan Hyophoe and the Sobuk Hakhoe organized a mass rally, joined by a few Korean elder statesmen, to protest the Ilchinhoe’s petition. Ogaki also

178 Hatano Masaru, “Nikkan heigo undo: Uchida Ryohei to taigai koha seron no ugoki o chushin ni,” Ningen Kagaku: Joban Daigahu Ningen Kagakubu Kiyd (March 1993): 74. 179 It appears that the alliance broke down due to internal conflicts, especially the Taehan Hyophoe’s ambition to leadership and Ogaki’s maneuvers between Yi Wan-yong and the Resident-General. The Kokuryukai leaders in particular saw Ogaki and the Keijo Kishadan as obstacles to cooperation among the three bodies. Kokuryukai, Nikkan gappo hishi, ge-kan (Tokyo: Hara Shobo, 1966), 510-511. 180 Keijo Kenpeibuntai, Isshinkai ryakushi, 31. 181 Hatano, “Nikkan heigo undo,” 82.

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appealed to his Korean allies through his newspaper Taehan Minbo.m Other Korean organizations followed suit by condemning the Ilchinhoe leaders as traitors to the nation in a barrage of petitions and memorials, while the vernacular press helped spread the public outcry beyond the capital to educated Koreans and yangban elites in the provinces. The settler journalists in Seoul also severely censored Uchida and other Kokuryukai members involved in the campaign. The Keijo Kishadan assailed Uchida for his rash and self-aggrandizing actions, and promptly wired their protest to the metropole. Unlike the Korean organizations, however, the Keijo Kishadan was not fundamentally opposed to the idea of annexation itself. On the contrary, according to its statement issued on December 21, what outraged the journalists were the Ilchinhoe’s use of an evasive term, “political merger (,seigappo),” and the “crafty and abominable” conduct of the Ilchinhoe engineered by Uchida and ultranationalists.183 In other words, the settler leaders argued for a more full-fledged annexation of Korea, while also displaying a sense of competition as “pioneers” vis-a-vis the ultranationalists in influencing the course of empire. On the other hand, settlers who had been impatient with Ito’s gradualist approach to Korean reform welcomed the Ilchinhoe’s campaign as breaking the stalemate. For instance, while describing its leaders as “claptrap dealers” (kiwamonoshi) devoid of credibility and public support, Shakuo Shunjo nonetheless endorsed their action as a heroic coup to bring about the annexation of Korea which was “what the world wants.” 184 Settler journalists such

182 Kokuryukai, Toa senkaku shishi kiden, ge-kan, 143. 183 Yomiuri Shinbun, December 26, 1909; Kokuryukai, Nikkan gappo hishi, ge-kan, 412-418; “Jiji sudai,” Chosen, January 1910, 7. The Keijo Kishadan had earlier issued similar statements concerning the Hague Incident in 1907 and Ito’s assassination in October 1909, urging the Resident-General to bring about “a fundamental conclusion” to the Japan-Korea relations. 184 Kyokuhosei, “Goho mondai,” Chosen, January 1910, 6.

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as Kikuchi Kenjo, Hagiya Kazuo, and Miyakawa Gorozaburo openly endorsed the Ilchinhoe’s annexation movement too.185 Although Resident-General Sone accepted the petition, the Ilchinhoe’s campaign annoyed him, whose foremost concern was to maintain public peace in times of political instability. He thus gave only a cold shoulder to the Ilchinhoe’s petition, and apparently paid settler journalists to run articles and publish a statement to denounce its activity.186 Although the metropolitan government had no intention of taking either side in order to keep a balance of power among contending parties, Sone finally decided, in late December 1909, to order both Uchida and Ogaki to leave the peninsula as “a last strategy to restore harmony in the Korean political world.”187 The conflict between these two Japanese advisors seems to have caused much embarrassment to the Japanese army commander stationed in Korea, who reported to Minister Terauchi that Yi Wan-yong and other Koreans were “sneering [at them] behind their back,” and stressed the urgent need to resolve the tension in order to prevent the Koreans from “exploiting it.”188 Although the military authorities had thwarted Sone’s attempt to order Uchida out of Korea, the virulent public reaction and the loss of legitimacy among both settlers and Koreans worried the Katsura Cabinet. In order to mediate the conflict between the journalists and the Ilchinhoe and investigate the political situation in Korea, representatives of the Chosen Mondai Doshikai (Korea Problems Association), formed by hardliners in the Diet like Ogawa Heikichi, ultranationalist leaders like Uchida and Sugiyama Shigemaru, and 185 Kokuryukai, Nikkan gappo hishi, ge-kan, 544. 186 Ibid., 542, 543-4. 187 Hatano, “Nikkan heigo und5,” 77, 81; “Jiji sudai,” Chosen, January 1910, 7. 188 Hatano, “Nikkan heigo undo,” 81.

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some journalists in October 1909,189 visited Seoul in the following January (1910). They met with the members of the Keijo Kishadan, but the discord between the two remained.190 The Katsura Cabinet subsequently ordered the Ilchinhoe to suspend the campaign. Nonetheless, by that time Uchida and Sugiyama had more or less accomplished their goal of setting the stage for annexation. In February 1910, Sugiyama told Uchida that he had secured an agreement from the Japanese government that it would take the initiative toward annexation with no Korean intervention in the matter. By April, the resignation o f Sone, whom Uchida and Sugiyama wanted out o f their way, had also become a matter o f time.191 The annexation treaty was finally signed on August 22, 1910. As a result, the Ilchinhoe as well as all other political organizations were ordered to disband—the Ilchinhoe received a generous sum of 100,000 yen to dissolve the organization. The above examples demonstrate how settlers were deeply involved in the turbulent politics of late Choson Korea and influenced the Japanese policy-makers in deciding on the full annexation of Korea. The presence and activities of settlers, in effect, served to complicate the already convoluted and unstable relationships among the Japanese state, the Korean cabinet, Korean reformers, and Japanese rightwing chauvinists. The Ilchinhoe campaign shows that neither policy-makers nor settlers were united in their views on the pace and form that Japan should take in consolidating its political stranglehold over Korea. The involvement of settlers and the interference of ultranationalists in Korea’s self-strengthening movement, moreover, served to obstruct rather than facilitate the process of Korean reform, by deepening tension between hardliners and gradualists in Tokyo and in Seoul, by 189 Ibid., 75. 190 Kokuryukai, Nikkan gappo hishi, ge-kan, 325-327. 191 Hatano, “Nikkan heigo und5,” 82.

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sharpening divisions within the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement (between the “proJapanese” Ilchinhoe and other political groups), and by allowing some opportunistic Korean elites such as Song Pyong-jun to use these Japanese interlocutors to their own advantage.192 Overall, the activities and conflicts of settlers and ultranationalist leaders had the effect of accelerating the annexation of Korea by undermining Ito’s effort to build a stable collaborative structure with Korean officials and reformers, and compelling the Japanese government to abandon a gradualist approach to Korean reform.193 While Uchida and ultranationalist leaders had to retreat to the metropole in the wake of the annexation movement, settler advisors, Ogaki and Takahashi, stayed in Korea and continued to play an influential role as settler leaders and as semi-official agents o f empire.194

Conclusion More than bystanders to Japan’s imperialist diplomacy, settlers played a crucial role as grassroots builders of empire in the trajectory of early and fledgling Japanese dominance on the peninsula. From the ousting of Chinese overlordship from the peninsula, to the protectorate rule following Japan’s victory over Russia, and to the final annexation prompted by the Ilchinhoe and other forces in and outside Korea, settlers actively supported and prodded the Meiji state to expand its control over Korea through commerce, railway building, land seizure, discourse, and political maneuver.

192 Rather than merely depicting the Ilchinhoe as a pro-Japanese organization manipulated by Uchida Ryohei, Yamabe Kentaro notes how Song Pyong-jun and the Kokuryukai tried to use and deceive each other like “a play between a fox and a raccoon.” Yamabe Kentaro, Nihon no Kankoku heigo, 259-267. 193 Duus also attributes the failure of Ito’s gradualist policy to the fact that Ito seriously underestimated the strength of anti-Japanese resistance and the disruptive impact of reform on the Korean society. 194

Takahashi became a leading member of the Seoul Residents’ Association around the time of annexation, while Ogaki worked for the Government-General as a part-time employee in the 1910s. Disappointed by the pace of Korean reform, Ogaki radically changed his stance after annexation and became virtually a propagandist of the Governor-General’s mle.

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Although the rate of failure was high and many returned home penniless, the empire brought many opportunities for enterprising and self-striving Japanese. The empire enabled Japanese merchants and traders to dominate foreign trade at treaty ports, and offered opportunities for shop clerks or commercial apprentices to open their own businesses more quickly than their counterparts at home. It also granted building contractors and engineers monopolistic opportunities to supervise railway construction and various infrastructure projects around the peninsula. Furthermore, the establishment o f protectorate rule provided greater political and economic security for settler commerce, and created more jobs for a growing “new middle class” of educated Japanese. For some settlers, Korea also provided an outlet for their frustrated political ambitions at home, while for others, it served as a laboratory for bringing about a “second Meiji Restoration” on Korean soil. The empire, indeed, offered unprecedented opportunities for ordinary Japanese to transform themselves into extraordinary individuals. Although the settlers’ lives chart diverse paths to success, their various and often conflicting agendas—material wealth, social status, political leverage, Pan-Asianism— together provided a source of momentum for Japan’s colonization of Korea. In pursuing these ambitions, the settlers in turn capitalized upon the expanding Japanese political control over Korea. This reciprocal relationship between state and settlers was most clearly demonstrated by the rise of some nouveau riche settlers, who joined the state in exploiting Korea’s natural resources and acquired wealth and status that surpassed those of high-ranking bureaucrats. By far the wealthiest settler entrepreneur was Tomita Gisaku, a mining parvenu (kozan narikin), whose unrivaled fortune made from iron mines in Chinnamp’o won him nicknames like “Korea’s Shibusawa” and better yet, “civilian Governor-General” (“minkan sotoku")}95

195 For Tomita’s biography, see Tomita Seiichi, Tomita Gisaku den (Chinnamp’o, Korea, 1936).

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In Pusan, Kashii Gentaro, a former soshi in the Genyosha who also studied under Katsu Kaishu in his adolescent years, became a fishing parvenu (gyogyd narikin) or Korea’s “king of marine products” by obtaining the right, through Ito’s mediation, to manage the best fisheries in Korea owned by the Yi Royal Household.196 A fellow settler in Pusan, Hazama Fusataro, on the other hand, cooperated with the army in buying up land around the Japanese settlement and amassed a huge fortune at the time o f the Russo-Japanese War—be was said to own fully half o f the city’s land by 1910.197 And Fujii Kantaro, Korea’s “irrigation king” (,suiri-o), built his wealth in Kunsan by instigating various irrigation and land reclamation projects for developing Korean agriculture.198 The emergence of these powerful settlers indeed mirrored the rapid and dramatic rise of modem Japan onto the international stage. These settler pioneers were also products o f a new capitalist culture centered on the success that emerged in Japan in the years following the Russo-Japanese War.199 The age of success or “success stories” clearly spread beyond Japan’s national borders, as a slew of “success stories” of settler pioneers also appeared in Korea after 1905. Biographies and hagiographies of rich settler businessmen filled pages of local newspapers and magazines, which, like their metropolitan counterparts, presented them as “models of samurai virtue and merchant talent” while playing down the profit motive.200 Some of these settler pioneers later

196 Tanaka Ichinosuke (Reisui), ed., Zensen shoko kaigisho hattatsushi (Pusan: Pusan Nipposha, 1936), Pusan-hen, 56-57. 197 Nakamura Shiryo, Keijo, Jinsen shokugyd meikan, 304-5; Chosen oyobi Manshu, August 1925, 94-96. 198 Nakamura, Keijo, Jinsen shokugyd meikan, 304-5. 199 Oka Yoshitake, “Generational Conflict After the Russo-Japanese War,” in Conflict in Modern Japanese History, ed. Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 197-8. 200 See Earl H. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought: From Samurai to Salary Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 164-165.

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had their own biographies written (Tomita Gisaku, Yamaguchi Tahee, and Fukunaga Seijiro) or reminiscences collected from equally impressive friends (Aruga Mitsutoyo and Watanabe Benz5), and even statues erected (Kashii Gentaro201 and Oike Tadasuke in Pusan; Yamaguchi Tahee in Seoul; and Nishizaki Tsurukichi in Chinnamp’o202). Settler leaders also celebrated and enshrined their own achievements by editing histories of settler pioneers,203 and forming their own exclusive social clubs.204 However, in Japan self-advancement was not always linked to imperialistic expansion abroad and was more focused on domestic concerns such as the growth of the Japanese economy and society.205 By contrast, in Korea individual success and national expansion were inextricably linked to each other: in the eyes of Japanese, any settler success in enterprise automatically became a contribution to Korea’s development. For such “contributions” they made, the settler leaders were officially recognized as “civilian men of merit” at various imperial or commemorative ceremonies. At the enthronement ceremony of the Showa Emperor held in Kyoto in November 1928, for instance, six Koreans and seven Japanese were selected to represent the thirteen provinces of Korea—all o f the seven

201 Takahara Kiji, ed., Kyojin Kashii ou no henrin: tozo jomakushiki ni saishite (Pusan, 1935); Tanaka, Zensen shoko kaigisho hattatsushi, 56-57. 202 Chosen oyobi Manshu, September 1928, 75. 203 In the mid-1920s, pioneering merchants (Yamaguchi, Wada, Ikeda, Koezuka), journalists (Ogaki, Fujimura), scholar (Ayukai), ronin (Omura, Kikuchi), lawyers (Takahashi, Asakura) together formed a social club called the “Chosen futamukashi kai.” Its membership was restricted to those who had been in Korea for more than twenty years. They compiled and published their own history of straggle as pioneers in Fujimura Tokuichi, Kyoryumin no mukashi monogatari (1927). 204 In 1917, Keijo’s “young leaders” mostly in their thirties and forties, including company employees, journalists, merchants, and public officials formed a fraternal organization called the Keijo Wakabakai. “Atarashiki seinenno shakodan Wakabakai,” Chosen koron, June 1917, 87. 205 Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man, 154.

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Japanese were long-time settler pioneers such as Yamaguchi Tahee (Kyonggi Province), Tomita Gisaku (South P’yongan Province), and Oike Tadasuke (South Kyongsang Province).206 Kashii and Tomita were also later awarded high honors and titles, which were even rare among top-class entrepreneurs in Japan at the time.207 And long-time Japanese leaders who served in various public posts through the 1930s were again awarded special recognition at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Korean Government-General’s Rule in October 1935.208 The settler leaders also self-consciously linked their individual pursuits to national prosperity and expansion, and frequently enjoined fellow Japanese to do the same—often by evoking the teachings o f Fukuzawa Yukichi and Tokutomi Soho, for instance 209 Many settler leaders had a strong soshi character, and some of them, who had participated in metropolitan politics or harbored such political ambitions, continued to seek seats in the Diet in the colonial period.210 Many of them also actually fought in the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars, experiences that shaped their unusually strong patriotic mentality. At the same time, however, there was a considerable gap between the settlers’ self­ perception and the general Korean sentiment about their “success.” Whereas the Japanese

206 “Gotaiten sanretsu no Chosen kakudo daihyosha,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, November 1928, 84. 207 Ichi kisha, “Konkai no gotaiten de joi jokun hyosho sareta zaisen no hitobito,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, December 1928, 62. 208 See Morikawa, Chosen Sotokufu shisei nijugoshunen kinen hydshosha meikan (1935). 209 By the time of annexation, however, Tokutomi Soho had entered the “establishment” and became a supervisor to the Keijo Nippd. “Terauchi Sotoku to taigenron seisaku,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, October 1910, 7-8. Shakuo Shunjo was profoundly disappointed when he met Tokutomi whose journalistic career had inspired Shakuo in his adolescent years. Kyokuhosei, “Shotaimen no bungo Tokutomi Soho,” in ibid., 40-42. 210 For instance, see Chosen oyobi Manshu, April 1915, 38-39.

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literature of success idolized these settler pioneers, the Korean people, especially the traditional yangban elite, tended to scorn them as mere nouveaux riches and regard Western culture as far superior to Japanese culture—Ogaki Takeo later observed this Korean contempt as one of the main reasons why settlers could command little respect from the local population.211 In addition, the settler leaders’ sense of shouldering the burden of empire was not necessarily shared by lower-class settlers and younger migrants, whose daily commercial endeavors were driven by a concern for profit rather than patriotism. The microhistory of settlers in Korea, then, seems to telescope Japan’s new challenges as a rising modem nation-state. On the one hand, the settler pioneers represented the new confidence of a rapidly modernizing nation and an entrepreneurial fever among the young who yearned for success and self-advancement after the 1880s. On the other hand, the settlers embodied the anxieties of Japan’s nascent empire still struggling to attain the status worthy of a first-class nation,212 compounded by a growing concern about a declining sense of loyalty to the state among post Russo-Japanese war youth. While empire certainly became a rallying point for expressing popular discontent or political dissent against the establishment in Japan (since the Hibiya Riot of 1905), the surge of patriotism during the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars did not turn into a more long-term project of popular imperialism, as demonstrated by the slow pace of agrarian migration and investment in Korea. The settler leaders who stood on the frontline of empire thus bore the brunt of harnessing individualism to imperial expansionism—redirecting people’s energy from the goal of national sovereignty to the goal of national expansion—a challenge that accompanied Japan’s

211 Ogaki Takeo, “Chiho zaikinno kanri shokun e,” Chosen (Chosen Sotokufu) 79 (September 1921): 111. 212 Hasegawa Tenki quoted in Oka Yoshitake, “Generational Conflict,” 212.

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transition to a capitalist and industrial society. The brokers o f empire were vehicles of Japan’s modernity itself.213 Nonetheless, such a task became increasingly difficult over time, even on the imperial frontier. First of all, opportunities for success or the chances o f “striking it rich” diminished markedly as the port cities became more modernized, wartime demand for supplies and construction and engineering works disappeared, and the structures of Japanese political control became firmly entrenched in the peninsula after annexation. As the path to success became narrower and restricted to college graduates, middle-class settlers sought to climb the social ladder by taking advantage of the discriminatory payroll system and employment structure in the colony. The settler leaders, on the other hand, controlled key institutions of settler self-government such as chambers of commerce to advance their interests and visions of empire, and used the local press to foster greater self-awareness among fellow Japanese residents. More detrimentally, however, such settler efforts to expand their interests and role in the empire were increasingly hampered by the Korean Governor-General’s rule inaugurated in 1910. As we will see in the next chapter, just as the settlers began to articulate their identity as pioneers, the new colonial overlord implemented an authoritarian rule that not only suppressed the political and cultural life of the Korean people, but also restricted settlers’ enterprise and undermined their autonomy, thereby radically changing the dynamic of empire-building.

213 Oka Yoshitake, “Generational Conflict,” 203.

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CHAPTER 3: Annexation and “Military Rule” in the 1910s

From Subalterns to Sub-imperialists: the Emergence o f Brokers o f Empire While sharing broad visions of national glory and empire, settlers pursued a variety of interests and aspirations, from material profit and political leverage to a more aggressive vision of expansionism. Settler colonialism was driven by these diverse and often conflicting agendas that did not neatly overlap with official policy concerns, but together drove the imperialist project forward. The intersection of the Meiji state’s expansionism and settlers’ subimperialism pushed the frontier of Japanese settlement beyond a tiny enclave of merchants and sojourners confined to treaty ports. Settler communities around the peninsula, connected by new railway lines and coastal shipping routes, increasingly functioned as nodes of growing Japanese hegemony. By 1910, Japanese settlers physically dominated the Korean landscape in cities such as Pusan, Masan, Mokp’o, In’chon, and Sinuiju where they formed almost half of the population and “kept the Korean masses at bay simply by sheer force of number and density.”1 The physical entrenchment of Japanese in Korea indeed became a form of domination itself. With the growth of settler communities also developed a distinct ideology of empire centered on the settlers’ awareness as true “pioneers” who “came to Korea before the Japanese flag.”2 This ideology was articulated most strongly by those economically powerful or politically influential settlers, whom we have begun to see in action. Available biographical dictionaries on prominent Japanese, such as the Chosen Zaiju Naichijin jitsugyoka jinmei jiten, vol. 1 (1913) and the Keijo Ginseng shokugyd meikan (1926), furnish

1Duus, The Abacus, 334. 2 Kojo Kando, “Shinshisei ni taishite,” Chosen (Chosen Sotokufu) 80 (October 1921); 66-69.

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detailed information about who led the local Japanese community and how these settlers became influential civilian leaders by the time of annexation. Using these sources, I have generated a list of 112 civilians based in Seoul who led the local Japanese community from 1905 through the mid-1930s.3 Of the 112 settlers, 12 came to Korea before the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5), and 27 came between the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War and the eve of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). But the largest number, 54, came during the RussoJapanese War and the protectorate period (1905-1910). And 19 more came to Korea in the 1910s. Excepting colonial officials and members o f the garrison/army, local Japanese leaders fall into the following main categories, though in many cases they overlapped: (1) merchants and entrepreneurs; (2) building contractors and engineers; (3) bank/company executives; (4) free professionals (journalists, lawyers, educators) and ronin.4 I call these influential settler leaders “brokers o f empire.” Broadly speaking, they were long-time Japanese residents, who managed settler daily affairs through key local “self­ ruling” institutions such as residents’ associations and chambers of commerce, and spent the rest or most of their adult life on the peninsula. They later became a veritable “who’s who” in Korea, recorded in numerous biographical dictionaries and officially recognized for their contribution to the empire as “civilian men of merit.” Though diverse in occupation and background, they shared a history o f struggle and adventure and had a strong patriotic (soshi) character as the earliest Japanese to settle and succeed in Korea. In the following pages, I will briefly describe each group and introduce some of the protagonists of my story.

3 See Appendix. The list of settler leaders includes prominent Japanese civilians based in Seoul, who settled in Korea before annexation or in the 1910s, lived there for over two decades, and served in at least one of the key community institutions (residents’ associations, chambers of commerce, city and provincial councils, and school associations) and other settler-led political organizations in the period o f 1910-1930s. 4 There were 6 other settler leaders who do not fit into these categories: 4 public officials (koshokusha), 1 owner of iron works, and 1 restaurant owner.

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Merchants and entrepreneurs Half of the settler leaders (57) were engaged in commerce and trade, which represented the largest occupational category. Perhaps the most spectacular pattern of “success” in this group was represented by 12 merchants who came to Korea before the SinoJapanese War of 1894-5 with little or no capital, and obtained a certain measure of success by the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-5. These pioneering merchants had been bom between the 1850s and the 1870s, in the midst of the Meiji Restoration, and the majority of them came to Korea before or during the Sino-Japanese War. Many o f them came to Korea to look for a new job or find their first employment after graduating from primary or middle school in Japan. In doing so, they relied on kinship ties (starting with shops mn by their relatives) or sought employers from the same native place. Before becoming self-employed and opening their own shop, some had worked for Korean branches of metropolitan companies or local Japanese shops, or had been apprenticed to big merchants. A slightly smaller number of them changed their careers and opened their own businesses immediately after arrival. As compared to the metropole, it was relatively easy for former shop employees to start their own business in the colony: whereas it took on average a decade or two to set up one’s own shop in Japan, it took about eight years in Korea, with the quickest becoming self-employed within a year after arrival, indicating high social mobility in the colony.5 In the politically unstable and commercially risky environment, however, most of these merchants switched from one job to another as opportunity for profit beckoned, and faced tough competition from Chinese merchants too. When they finally carved out a niche in the local market and had accumulated some wealth, most of these merchants became traders or had a real estate/house rental business.

5 Kimura, “Settling into Korea,” Occasional Papers in Japanese Studies (June 2002), 5.

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These pioneering settlers were represented by Seoul-based merchants o f peninsulawide fame, notably Wada Tsuneichi, Nakamura Saizo, and Yamaguchi Tahee, who came to Korea in the early 1880s and grew into the wealthiest merchants in Korea by the protectorate period. Wada epitomized the entrepreneurial spirit of settler traders, who made up the largest occupational group in this period. He came to Pusan in 1881, after a few years of commercial apprenticeship in Nagasaki. Wada then moved to Wonsan to work as a druggist, and in 1883 moved to In’chon and began a trading business, as many Japanese did at the time. In 1886, he entrusted the business to his elder brother and moved to Seoul to open an import-trade store dealing in cotton, textiles, petroleum, etc. from Osaka and Nagasaki. As his business fortune finally began to grow, Wada established a currency exchange in 1902 and served as its director, and further expanded his entrepreneurial activity by establishing the Keijo Kigyo Company and a hot spring company, as well as starting tobacco farming.6 Nakamura Saizo was one among many Japanese who first came to Korea to manage branch offices of metropolitan companies and banks, and later set up their own businesses. Bom in Fukuoka in 1855, Nakamura began working for the Osaka Marusan Bank in 1882, and two years later he was dispatched to its Pusan branch. Due to political unrest in that year, however, the branch was forced to close and he subsequently returned to Osaka. In 1886, Nakamura quit the bank and went back to Korea and opened a sundry goods store in Seoul, and also started a pawn shop in 1890. But it was the outbreak o f the Sino-Japanese War that turned him into a rich man overnight: he amassed land and property abandoned by fleeing local residents and became the biggest landlord in the city. Nakamura was also appointed as

6 Kawabata Gentaro, ed., Chosen zaiju naichijin jitsugyoka jinm eijiten, vol. 1 (Keijo [Seoul]: Chosen Jitsugyo Shinbunsha, 1913), 77-78.

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an army purveyor. Subsequently, he engaged himself in trading business, and like Wada, expanded his repertoire of enterprise by establishing the Keijo Bank, the Hinomaru Marine Products Company, and the Manshu Industrial Company. Nakamura also proposed the creation of the Seoul Chamber of Commerce, and became its first vice-head in 1899 and later its head, as well as the first mincho of the Seoul Residents’ Association.7 Yamaguchi Tahee represented another dramatic pattern o f settler success: becoming independent from a former employer and setting up one's own business within a few years after settlement in Korea.8 Bom in Kagoshima in 1865, Yamaguchi went to Tokyo hoping to obtain higher education, but he gave up on his ambition due to family demands and worked as a rice merchant for two years in the early 1880s. After briefly going back home, in 1884 he moved to Osaka and worked for a Korean trading business mn by his relative, while also selling camphor from Satsuma in Kobe. He traveled several times between the main store in Osaka and its branch stores in Pusan and In’chon. But when the store went bankrupt, Yamaguchi went to Korea by himself in 1885 and began working for the Sawada Commercial Company in Seoul. Two years later, he opened his own trading business exporting ox bones, ox hide, and fur, and importing tobacco, marine products, and straw sacks from Japan. In 1890, Yamaguchi switched his business and opened a drapery and sundry goods store in Seoul. Once his store became a paying concern, Yamaguchi entrusted his business to his brother in 1905. Yamaguchi subsequently founded and managed a wide variety of companies-including Keijo Electric, the Keijo Bank, the Hinomaru Marine

7 Ibid., 121-2. 8 Kimura, “Settling into Korea,” 4.

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Products Company, Chosen Yusen, Chosen Ceramics, and the Central Railway Company— while also serving in community institutions such as the chamber o f commerce.9 The rags-to-riches patterns of success o f Wada, Nakamura, and Yamaguchi, who came to be known as the oldest settler “genro” in Korea, became the favorite subjects of local Japanese newspapers and magazines after 1905. The three pioneering merchants are known to have built everything from roads and railways, to schools, hospitals, banks, and the rest of the “Japan town.” As we have seen earlier, they were also the key settler lobbyists during the railway-building campaign in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War. Without the trio, it was said, “nothing could be settled” concerning the affairs of Japanese residents.10 Twenty-seven settler leaders, who came to Korea between the Sino-Japanese War and the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, represented a wider variety of occupations— retail or wholesale merchants, entrepreneurs, building contractors, professionals (jiyugyd)—indicating how the pattern of success became diversified after 1894.11 In particular, we see the rise of many powerful merchants (9) during the interwar period, which saw the declining influence of Chinese merchants and the expansion of Japanese economic dominance on the peninsula. In contrast to the earlier period of struggle, Japanese merchants were now better able to take advantage of the novelty of Japanese goods for local Korean residents (hardware in the case of Kugimoto Tojiro) or Western groceries, whose sales among the Korean upper-class

9 Kawabata, Chosen zaiju naichijin, 156-7. 10 Ichi kisha, “Keijo no nijunento,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, April 1927, 126. n O f the 26 settlers, 10 of them arrived in Korea during the Sino-Japanese War, and 16 arrived in the interwar years (1896-1904) before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War.

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increased even more dramatically after the Russo-Japanese War (in the case of Takagi Tokuya and Shin Tatsuma).12 After the Russo-Japanese War, we see a more rapid and dramatic growth of powerful settler merchants and entrepreneurs (totaling 20), who operated in a more politically stable environment under Japanese protectorate rule. During the Russo-Japanese War and afterwards, some of these settlers enjoyed the security o f business as official and army purveyors (in the case of Fujita Yonesaburo, Kobayashi Genroku, and Shiraishi Gen). The Russo-Japanese War also brought a large number of merchants who sold soy sauce, miso, pickles, sake, confectionary, kimono, Japanese furniture, medicine, and other daily necessities to the rapidly growing number of company employees, public officials, and administrative clerks who worked for the protectorate government. In contrast to the earlier period, there were also a substantial number of former employees of small- and medium­ sized shops in Japan who quit their jobs and moved to Korea to open their own shops.

Building Contractors and Engineers The Japanese commercial penetration into Korea went hand in hand with the development of an industrial infrastructure. In contrast to the Japanese migrants to Hawaii and North America who were mostly migrant laborers, most Japanese laborers in Korea were skilled or semiskilled workers.13 They were in great demand in the 1890s and early 1900s for

12 “Hakurai zakka oyobi shokuryohin ni taisuru Chosenjin no juyo,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, April 1910, 8385. 13 Kimura Kenji, “Kindai Nihon no imin/shokumin katsudo to chukanso,” Rekishigaku Kenkyu 613 (November 1990), in Yanagisawa and Okabe, Teikokushugi to shokuminchi, 167-171.

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laying and expanding modem infrastmctures such as roads, harbors, bridges, and railroads in treaty port cities.14 The Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars created many jobs for Japanese building contractors, engineers, and foremen, who directed the work o f Korean and Japanese laborers in the construction o f railways, such as the Seoul-Pusan and Seoul-Uiju Lines. In particular, the establishment o f the Seoul-Pusan Railway Company in 1903 and the construction of the line that began in December of that year brought many contractors from Japan. Moreover, the expansion of military railways, such as the Seoul-Uiju Line and the Masan Line, further invigorated the construction sector, with over 300 big and small companies operating in Korea at the time.15 These building contractors and engineers included Shiki Shintaro, Terao Mozaburo, and Narimatsu Midori who came to Korea during the interwar period. After the construction of these lines, some continued to work for the army or the colonial government as officially designated contractors. The Russo-Japanese War brought more powerful building contractors, such as Arai Hatsutaro, Watanabe Sadaichiro, and Tanaka Hanshiro, who would later lead the Korea Civil Engineering and Construction Association (Chosen Doboku Kenchiku Kyokai) and the Seoul Chamber of Commerce. In contrast to the merchants, these building contractors and engineers also tended to be more educated, with degrees from higher or commercial schools. Moreover, many of them had made forays into the Diet or local politics before coming to Korea: Narimatsu and

14 Duus, The Abacus, 338. Japan was the principal exporter of modem skilled or semiskilled labor in the 1890s and 1900s. In fact, it was difficult for manual laborers to find employment when there was already an abundant supply of cheap labor in Korea. Japanese workers had to be either factory supervisors or technicians to find many employment opportunities in Korea. 15 Oka Ryosuke, Keijo hanjoki (Keijo [Seoul]: Hakubunsha, 1915), 292.

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Tanaka worked as public officials before coming to Korea, while Arai devoted his earlier career to politics as a member of the Jiyuto. Such a background explains the active participation and leadership of building contractors in local community institutions, especially during the first two decades of colonial rule.

Company and bank executives In contrast to the pioneering merchants, some settler leaders from the start enjoyed a more stable career by working for established companies after obtaining a university degree. They had survived the increasingly intense competition for higher education and the attendant problem of unemployment among university graduates in interwar Japan. Musha Renzo was one of the eight settler leaders who represented this pattern of success. He first entered the Daiichi Bank after graduating from Tokyo Higher Commercial School in 1905. A year later, he was transferred to Korea to manage its branch office in Seoul. After an illness, in 1909 Musha resumed his career, this time as a manager of its Pusan branch. In the same year, he entered the newly established Nikkan Gas (later Keijo Electric), and thereafter worked in various positions and moved up through promotions to become its executive. In 1917, Musha retired from the company and in July of the same year established the Taiwan Coal Mining Company. In 1923, he became the senior managing director o f Keijo Electric.16 Like Musha, most of the settler leaders who worked for corporations came to Korea after the Russo-Japanese War. As compared to the early settlers, they tended to rely less and less on kinship or native place ties and have a higher educational background. This reflected a larger trend among Japanese company employees stationed in Korea. For instance, almost all executives and managers of branches of metropolitan-based banks and large corporations, 16 Kawabata, Chosen zaijii Nichijin, 139; Nakamura Shiryo, Keijo Jinsen shokugyd meikan, 226; Chosen Denki Jigyoshi Henshu Iinkai, ed., Chosen denkijigyoshi (Tokyo: Chuo Nikkan Kyokai, 1981), 582-587.

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such as Nikkan Gas and Electricity, Chosen Yiisen, Toa Tabako, and Mitsui Bussan, were university graduates17 or had passed the civil service exam or the Foreign Ministry’s foreign exchange student exam.18 Moreover, another eight settler leaders who worked for corporations were former bureaucrats. In fact, many officials, policemen, and army officers after retirement entered the business world, especially in Seoul.19 Some of the settler leaders had served in the key ministries of the metropolitan government, such as the Ministries of Finance (Aruga Mitsutoyo and Kochiyama Rakuzo) and Communications (especially the Railway Bureau), and those in the Railway Bureau came to Korea for railway construction around the time of the Russo-Japanese War (as in the case of Takeuchi Kikutaro). Many of them had high educational backgrounds, but not necessarily degrees from the highest universities such as the Tokyo Imperial University’s Law Department, or had passed the civil service exam. Several settler leaders were former local government officials and employees in Japan who turned to enterprise after settling in Korea. Former high-ranking bureaucrats usually became executives of large banks and corporations-a phenomenon known as amakudari that also became common in Japan around this time. Many former bureaucrats of the Residency-General, for instance, became directors or section chiefs of the Oriental Development Company. Kochiyama Rakuzo of Chosen Fire Insurance, Aruga Mitsutoyo of Chosen Industrial Bank, and Wada Ichiro of Chosen 17 The universities include the Tokyo Imperial University (Department o f Law), Kyoto Imperial University, Tokyo Higher Commercial School, Doshisha University, and Hosei University. 18 Kimura Kenji, “Zaichosen Nihonjin shokuminsha no ‘sakusesu suton,’” in Rekishi Hyoron (Rekishi Kagaku Kyogikai) 625 (May 2002): 62-63. 19 Former military officers and soldiers as well as employers of the army also entered the business world after the war. Many of them who had been conscripted for the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars set up shop by using the reward money (100-250 yen) they received for their military service. Ibid., 65.

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Commercial Bank all began their careers as deputy vice-ministers for financial affairs in the Residency-General and served in similar posts in the Government-General after annexation, before becoming presidents of their respective companies in the 1920s.20

Free Professionals Perhaps the most fascinating and least known group of settler leaders who played an important behind-the-scenes role in late Choson politics was the collectivity of professionals especially journalists and ronin. The earliest Japanese journalists to work in Korea were war correspondents for metropolitan newspapers or were dispatched by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the task of information gathering during the Sino-Japanese War. Kikuchi Kenjo was one of them. As we have seen, Kikuchi and other editorial staff o f the Kanjo Shinpo mn by the Kumamoto Kokkento joined the consulate officials, ultranationalists, and ronin in launching a political intrigue at the Korean court in 1895. Another settler leader, Nakamura Kentaro, who served as a director and editor of Keijo Nippo/Maeil Sinbo in the 1910s, came to Korea in 1899 as one of the Korean language exchange students from Kumamoto. These students were overseen by ronin from their home prefecture like Sasa Masayuki who managed the Kanjo Shinpo?1 It is indeed hard to draw clear distinctions between journalists and ronin in this period, for their activities overlapped in many ways. By contrast, seven other settler journalists who came to Korea after 1900 were almost all graduates from private universities (namely, Toyo, Hosei, Keio, Waseda, and Meiji). Some of them had worked for metropolitan newspapers before or after moving to Korea, and

20 Ichi kisha “Keijo no nijunento,” 119-121. 21According to Nakamura, Sasa Masayuki had much influence over these students as their “parent and mentor,” and visited the Rakutenkutsu almost every day to “guide and take care” o f them. Nakamura Kentaro, Chosen seikatsu gojiinen (Kumamoto: Seichosha, 1969), 13, 16-17.

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later started their own papers and magazines in Korea (Shakuo Shunjo and Aoyagi Tsunataro). Those who came after 1910 (Makiyama Kozo, Gondo Shirosuke, Arima Junkichi, and Ishimori Hisaya) joined an existing magazine company in Seoul immediate after graduating from a metropolitan university, and some of them set up their own newspaper companies in the 1920s. During the protectorate period, some of these journalists also worked for the Residency-General, the Korean Government, or the Yi Royal Household Agency as advisors (Aoyagi), administrators (Gondo), or part-time employees (Kikuchi). Along with ultranationalists and ronin, Ogaki Takeo also became involved in the operation of Korean political organizations. In contrast to other settler journalists, Ogaki had already accumulated an extensive journalistic career in the metropole before coming to Korea and joining the Taehan Hyophoe as its advisor in 1904. There were also politically active settler leaders in other professions. Like Ogaki, two lawyers, Takahashi Shonosuke and Okubo Masahiko, became involved in the Korean self­ strengthening movement as Japanese advisors. Both of them had been active in Diet politics before opening a law firm in Seoul. Two settler ronin, Sugi Ichirobei and Sato Torajiro, had also run for the House o f Representatives in the 1900s before moving to Korea. Whereas Sugi lost his first election and gave up on politics in Japan, Sato served three terms (1903, 1904, and 1908) as a representative from Gunma Prefecture before he came to Korea in 1912. These settler ronin led a colorful life rolling from one career to another as teachers, merchants, entrepreneurs, writers, journalists, and so forth, and played a particularly important role in assisting in Governor-General Saito’s effort to co-opt influential Koreans and leading the grassroots assimilation campaign in the 1920s. Settler educators also played a key role in the expansion of Japanese hegemony on the peninsula. Examples include the efforts of Ayukai Fusanoshin and Okumura Ioko to 107

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diffuse the Japanese language and culture among Korean youth, and the initiative of Fuchizawa Noe in promoting the education of Korean women. After 1910, they were joined by youth group leaders, such as Maeda Noboru, who worked as a kenpeitai officer in the 1910s and subsequently led settler youth organizations in the 1920s, and Niwa Kiyojiro who similarly devoted his career to the education of young settlers as well as the promotion of friendship with Korean Christians through the Chosen YMCA and the Chosen Railway Youth Association. These pioneering settlers, who represented areas as diverse as commerce, foreign trade, construction, banking, and journalism, continued to play an important role as civilian leaders in the colonial period. In the following pages, I will discuss how they sought to maintain and expand their power and leverage over empire-building within the limits of the Governor-General’s rule, inaugurated in 1910.

Military Rule By the time of annexation, the Japanese in Korea formed the largest overseas Japanese community anywhere. As a result of the post-war influx o f migration, the overall population of Japanese in Korea had quadrupled—from 42,460 in 1905 to 171,543 in 1910. The annexation brought another wave of migrants, adding on average 25,000 each year for the next six years.22 By 1919, the settlers’ community would expand to contain approximately 350,000, a two-fold increase since annexation. Thereafter the population continued to rise, albeit at a declining rate, with an addition of little less than a million every five years between 1920 and 1940. About one-third of the settler population in Korea was

22 Chosen Sotokufu Shomu Chosaka, Chosen ni okeru naichijin, 1-5.

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engaged in commerce, which represented the largest occupational category until the early 1920s when officials and white-collar workers began to outnumber merchants (table 3).

Table 3: Occupations of Japanese Residents in Korea, 1910-1940 1910

1920

1925

1930

1935

1940

Agriculture, forestry, livestock farming (20,623) Fishing and salt manufacture Manufacturing 26,811 Commerce and transportation 67,625 Officials and professionals 41,269 44,475 Other occupations Unemployed or unknown 9,886 Total 210,689

39,894 10,921 59,895 117,289 102,022 12,928 4,901 347,850

39,030 12,802 66,864 133,273 140,925 21,362 10,484 424,740

42,093 12,603 72,434 147,438 176,795 31,892 18,612 501,867

37,321 10,473 80,606 175,118 235,964 22,914 21,032 583,428

32,980 9,935 144,937 191,247 258,260 28,615 23,816 689,790

SOURCE: Chosen Sotokufii, Chosen Sotokufu tokei nenpo, 1911-1940. NOTE: The figure in brackets for 1910 combines agriculture, forestry, and fishing. Classifications are slightly different for the year 1940. For the category o f “Manufacturing,” I have combined figures for mining (22,273) and manufacturing (122,664). Likewise, I have combined figures for commerce (147,346) and transportation (43,901) in a single category of “Commerce and transportation.”

As the old bureaucratic capital of the Choson dynasty and the new administrative center of colonial Korea, by 1910 Seoul had come to supplant Pusan as home to the largest Japanese community in Korea (table 4). Seoul had also grown into a major commercial center with the sprawling suburb of Yongsan where many railway employees, military personnel, and their families lived. The Japanese settlers in Seoul, totaling about 38,000 (out of 250,000 residents), were mostly engaged in commerce, government, and service (table 5). Above all, Seoul became “a paradise for bureaucrats” and army officers, who were surrounded and catered to by swarms of merchants, laborers, and others engaged in miscellaneous trade. In contrast to the earlier period, settler merchants increasingly narrowed their clientele to these officials and fellow Japanese residents, and Korean elite patrons.23

23 “Chosen mondo,” Choscn(Chosm Zasshisha), October 1910, 60. See a stenographic record of the first retrospective round-table talk (kaiko zadankai) held in March 1940, in KSKN, part 3: fuhen, 23.

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Table 4: G row th of Japanese Population in Cities, 1890-1940 City Pusan Wonsan Seoul In’chon Mokp’o Chinnamp’o Kunsan Masan P’yongyang Taegu Sinuiju Kaesong Ch’ongjin Hamhung Taejong Chonju Kwangju % of urban residents

1890

1900

1910

1920

1930

4,344 680 609 1,612

5,758 1,578 2,115 4,208 894 339 488 252 159

24,936 4,636 38,397 11,126 3,612 4,199 3,737 7,081 6,917 6,492 2,742 (1,470) (2,182) (1,383)

33,085 7,134 65,617 11,281 5,273 4,793 5,659 4,172 16,289 11,942 3,824 (1,212) 4,114 (3,097) (4,164) (2,804) (2,825) 52.5%

44,273 9,334 97,758 11,238 8,003 5,894 8,781 5,559 18,157 29,633 7,907 1,390 8,355 7,096 (7,262) (6,484) (8,160) 56.8%

100.0%

99.8%

(1,541) (1,326) 66.4%

1940 54,266 12,923 150,627 18,088 8,018 6,879 9,901 5,643 27,635 19,506 9,431 1,858 27,805 10,929 9,550 6,338 8,293 56.2%

SOURCE: Naikaku Tokeikyoku, ed., Nihon tokei nenkan, Tokan Kanbo Bunshoka, ed., Tokanfu tokei nenpo, and Chosen Sotokufu, Chosen Sotokufu tokei nenpo. NOTE: Figures for 1890-1910 refer to populations in open port cities (except for those in brackets which refer to populations in provinces). Figures for 1920-1940 refer to populations in cities (fu).

Table 5: Occupations of Japanese Residents in Seoul, End of 1910 (N = 38,397) Occupation

# of Employed

164 Agriculture Fishing 11 Manufacturing 2,093 Commerce 2,702 Officials Government officials 2,233 Public officials 615 Teachers 124 Laborers 873 Geisha, waitresses 789 Professionals Doctors 66 Midwives 50 Journalists 69 Lawyers/prosecutors 19 Buddhist monks/missionaries 35 Shinto priests 13 Miscellaneous 2,586 Unemployed 865 Total 13,307

Family member

Total

%

375 21 3,507 5,634

539 32 5,600 8,336

1%

4,698 912 262 1,351 121

6,931 1,527 386 2,224 910

231 43 101 38 46 13 6,231 1,506 25,090

297 93 170 57 81 26 8,817 2,371 38,397

SOURCE: Chosen Sotokufu, Chosen Sotokufu tokei nenpo (1910), 87-91.

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15% 22% 18% 4% 1% 6% 2% 2%

23% 6% 100%

While the settler community swelled with a growing proportion of officials and administrators recruited from the metropole, civilian settlers continued to manage their own affairs through the local community institutions—chambers o f commerce and residents’ associations—which had become the key institutional base o f their autonomy. Ironically, the settlers’ sense of solidarity and their identity as pioneers were reinforced by the increasing bureaucratic encroachments on their autonomy by the new colonial overlord. Terauchi Masatake, the first Governor-General of Korea (1910-1916), not only suppressed Korean political and cultural activity, but also restricted settler press and enterprise, and repressed settler self-government. Under his coercive assimilation policy, which bound Koreans as well as settlers to his singular authority, the settler leaders groped for ways to deal with their increasingly unsettled positionality of being at once the objects and subjects of the GovernorGeneral’s rule. The creation of the Japanese colonial state led to an unprecedented intmsion of state power into the lives of local residents in Korea. Before the Japanese assumed full colonial control over Korea, the Choson state had made some significant developments in modem government, economy, and finance during the “Kabo” Reforms of 1894-6 and the Patriotic Enlightenment movement of the late 1890s. Nevertheless, Choson Korea was still a relatively weak state, which rested on a paradoxical structure of centralized bureaucracy and weak governance. Not surprisingly, the state possessed only a limited organizational capacity to penetrate into society, as a mere 330 magistrates (kunsu) governed a population of about 8-10 million people in the mid-nineteenth century.24 Above all, the state never succeeded in overcoming the power of the landed yangban aristocracy, and instead had become dependent

24 James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 12 .

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on that power for ruling the countryside. The Choson government was beset with financial weakness and chronic revenue shortage, due to its inability to broaden its tax base and curtail legal and de facto tax exemptions of the aristocracy. By contrast, the colonial state as a modem political “state” was a completely new phenomenon in Korea. It was a highly developed central bureaucratic state, wielding a mixture of vastly improved “despotic” power through an extensive network of police and security forces, and “infrastructural power” through a modernizing bureaucracy, a reformed land and taxation system, and modem transportation and communication networks.25 The colonial state also drastically shifted the balance of power vis-a-vis society in its favor. While making little attempt to alter the existing class structure and mobilizing the landed class for controlling the local population, the colonial government made all social groups and classes, including the once powerful landed aristocracy, subject to its power. Stripped of its traditional status, and now totally dependent on the colonial government for its landholdings, the landlord class ceased to be the state’s strongest competitor for power. The Japanese colonial state thus represented a novel mode of domination. It capitalized upon some pre­ modem structures, but operated through vastly modem institutions and mechanisms of coercion, which allowed the state to reach deeply and thoroughly into the lives of local inhabitants.26 This colonial state was placed under the highly centralized authority of the Korean Governor-General. Vested with the highest status and greatest independence from

251 borrow the term “infrastructural power” from Gi-Wook Shin and Do-Hyun Han, “Colonial Corporatism: The Rural Revitalization Campaign, 1932-1940,” in Shin and Robinson, Colonial Modernity in Korea, 93. 26 Flogging was a case in point. While the Japanese colonial authorities retained flogging as a premodem form of punishment for Korean offenders, they also introduced new disciplinary mechanisms by laying down more detailed rules for its execution. See Chulwoo Lee, “Modernity, Legality, and Power in Korea Under Japanese Rule,” in Shin and Robinson, Colonial Modernity in Korea, 35.

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metropolitan control among the Japanese colonial governors and responsible directly to the emperor himself, the first Governor-General Terauchi Masatake ruled Korea as “an empire within the empire” and wielded his authority as a “little emperor” himself.27 Under what came to be known as “military rule” (budan seiji), Korea was transformed into a colonial outpost manned by gendarmeries (kenpeitai) and policemen, who were in turn aided by a system of local reservists’ associations headed by gendarmerie officers.28 Police officers became an indelible mark of colonial life, as they micro-managed the daily affairs of local residents ranging from the maintenance of law and order, to the censorship of publications, and the supervision of hygiene and education. They also assisted the local governments in tax collection, irrigation, and water control, the promotion of industries, education, road building and repair, the encouragement of savings, and the arbitration o f disputes. Such “excessive attention” also entailed statistical enumeration of people in regularly updated censuses and land surveys, and vigorous campaigns to eradicate traditional ways o f life, from family burial practices to the slaughtering o f livestock, through a deluge o f laws and regulations to promote more “healthy” social practices.29 And yet, Terauchi retained the use of flogging to deal with Korean offenders, who were viewed as “docile bodies” possessing a low “level of

27 The issues of legal conformity to the Meiji Constitution and the autonomy of the govemors-generals of Korea and Taiwan became a matter of political debate in the Diet in the 1890s. See Edward I-te Chen, “The Attempt to Integrate the Empire: Legal Perspectives,” in Myers and Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, 248. 28 In the 1910s, there were 2,617 Japanese patrolmen (junsa) and 3,330 Korean patrolmen (including assistant patrolmen or junsaho), 3,305 gendarmerie (kenpei) and 4,749 gendarmerie assistants (kenpei hojoin), showing a higher percentage of Koreans who constituted about 60% o f the overall policing force. Yarnada Kanto, “Nihonjin keisatsukan ni taisuru Chosengo shorei seisaku,” Chosenshi Kenkyukai Ronbunshu 38 (October 2000): 138. One substation (two Japanese assisted by one Korean) for every 800 households was generally the rule. Ching-chih Chen, “Police and Community Control Systems in the Empire,” in Myers and Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, 224-5. 29 Chulwoo Lee, “Modernity, Legality, and Power in Korea,” 39.

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culture” (mindo), while stressing economic development as “a precondition for changing the flogging law.”30 In his “Proclamation of Annexation,” Terauchi declared assimilation to be the fundamental policy of the new colonial government:

It is a natural and inevitable course of things that the two peoples [of Korea and Japan] whose countries are in close proximity with each other, whose interests are identical and who are bound together with brotherly feelings, should amalgamate and form one body.31

In the atmosphere of Korean resistance and hostility, as recently demonstrated by the “righteous armies” (uibyong) movement of 1907, Terauchi sought to justify the Japanese annexation of Korea by claiming that the Japanese and Koreans were bound by organic and familial ties since the ancient past. Assimilation was a convenient fiction that naturalized Japanese rule as a corollary or telos of ethnic and cultural affinities, geographical proximity, and Japan’s deep comprehension of Korean history and sentiments. But Terauchi set out to apply this principle of assimilation in ways that required the Koreans to fulfill the same duties and obligations as “imperial subjects” (shinmin), while denying them the same civil rights and political freedom that the Japanese enjoyed at home. The result was an admixture of Meiji-style disciplinary enlightenment and complete suppression of public life particular to the colony. While enforcing a comprehensive program of economic modernization and Japanese language education, Terauchi banned political organizations and public meetings, restricted Korean bureaucratic appointments, and

30 Ibid., 34. 31 Government-General of Chosen, Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea), 1910-1911, (Keijo [Seoul]: Government-General of Chosen, 1912), 242.

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suspended virtually all Korean vernacular newspapers.32 Moreover, Terauchi persecuted many Korean nationalists as political criminals, driving many young Koreans and future nationalist leaders, such as Kim Song-su, Yi Kwang-su, and Chang T5k-su into exile in the United States, China, or in Japan, where they threw their lives into nationalist politics. While largely inheriting the administrative and legal structures and reform programs of the protectorate government, Terauchi applied the “Meiji strategies of modernization” to the development of Korea in a more coercive and comprehensive manner. One of his most notable achievements was the land registration and the cadastral surveys of 1910-1918, which rationalized and codified the tax system by assessing tax requirements and clarifying private land ownership. The colonial government also promoted the transfer of Japanese farming techniques, and introduced fertilizers and new seeds to raise agricultural productivity in Korea, which was expected to function as an agricultural colony supplying inexpensive rice to sustain Japan’s modernization. At the same time, the colonial government tightly controlled local commercial activity by enforcing the notorious Company Law of 1911.33 This law required both Koreans and Japanese to obtain official permission for establishing a company or a branch o f a metropolitan company. Such an authoritarian measure provoked criticism not only among settlers, but metropolitan Japanese as well. Moreover, while allowing settlers to continue managing their own educational affairs, the Government-General created a new system of colonial education to “enlighten, discipline, and indoctrinate” the Koreans. The official policy emphasized mass education o f Koreans,

32 The Governor-General issued the Security Law that empowered the colonial government to disband political associations and prohibit meetings—much broader power than what the Public Peace Police Law of 1890 granted the metropolitan government. 33 For a detailed study o f the Company Law, see Kobayashi Hideo, Shokuminchi e no kigyo shins hutsu: Chosen kaisha rei no bunseki (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1994).

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duplicating the lower track o f Japan’s two-track educational system, to promote a skilled labor force for the economic development of Korea, rather than to create an educated elite for political and technical careers.34 More significant in its long-term effect, the separate and unequal educational system was designed to transform Koreans into “loyal and obedient” subjects of the emperor by imposing Japanese language instruction and inculcating Korean students in Japanese values “on the basis of the Imperial Rescript o f Education” of 1890.35 The colonial government also closed many Korean-run private schools {sodang) in order to suppress nationalistic education and the growth of Korean political ambitions. Terauchi even ordered the removal and incineration o f some Korean history books and biographies of Korean heroes from schools, libraries, and homes.36 While crushing all Korean opposition to colonial rule, the Government-General assiduously sought to co-opt and cultivate “pro-Japanese” Korean collaborators for the new regime. In an effort to appease the traditional yangban Korean elite—especially former government officials and Confucian scholars—the colonial government showered them with honors and aristocratic titles, or pensioned them off to compensate for their loss of political power. Former high-ranking bureaucrats in the Korean government were also granted seats in the Central Council (K. Chungch’uwon, J. Chusuin). Previously a traditional Korean political

34 The colonial authorities made sure that post-elementary institutions for Koreans were lower in standard than their counterparts in Japan. Patricia Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan,” in Myers and Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, 282, 294, 300. 35 Quoted in Wonmo Dong, “A Study of Japanese Colonial Policy and Political Integration Effects,” in Korea Under Japanese Colonial Rule: Studies o f the Policy and Techniques o f Japanese Colonialism, ed. Andrew C. Nahm (Western Michigan University, 1973), 156. 36 David Brudnoy, “Japan’s Experiment in Korea,” in Monumenta Nipponica 25, no. 1/2 (1970): 191. In 1918, the government issued regulations requiring existing sodang to incorporate the Japanese language, Japanese versions of the Chinese classics textbooks, and arithmetic in their curricula. By 1918, about 4% of school-aged Korean children were in normal schools, approximating the achievement o f 5-6 percent in Taiwan in 1910. Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan,” 300.

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institution, the Central Council was recast as an advisory organ to the Japanese colonial government in 1915. Nonetheless, its role was limited to investigating and guiding the colonial government on matters related to Korean customs and culture.

Settlers under Military Rule

Abolition o f Settler Self-government Although settlers had opposed the Ilchinhoe’s hasty move toward annexation, they generally welcomed the formal colonization of Korea which promised a new degree of security and stability of Japanese dominance in Korea. Many settler merchants continued to enjoy state patronage, protection, and privilege as officially patronized purveyors. Some settlers found employment in the rapidly expanding colonial bureaucracy, while some gained the right to manage gold, silver, tungsten, and iron mines as well as forest resources and fisheries which increasingly came under Japanese state and corporate control. Their congratulatory mood quickly turned sour, however, as state power increasingly constrained their daily activity. Curiously, settlers also appeared to be quite frustrated about the Govemor-Generals’ “excessive attention” to the Koreans, which they interpreted as official lack of concern for settler affairs.37 Based on such misplaced jealousy, the settlers upbraided the official “Korean-centered” policy as “unfair” and antithetical to “isshi dojin” (impartial treatment, equal favor),38 and observed Terauchi’s conciliatory gestures toward Koreans with particular bitterness.39

37 See settler leaders’ critique and requests for the Governor-General in “Sotoku seiji ni taisuru hihyo oyobi kibo,” in Chosen oyobi manshu, April 1914, 88-103. 38 Chosen oyobi Manshu, July 1914, 2-3. 39 For instance, Shakuo argued that conciliatory social policy toward the Koreans made them increasingly “impertinent” to the Japanese by quoting the example of a conflict between Korean and Japanese students

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An article entitled “The Defects of the Governor-General ’s Rule: The Abandoned Japanese” sums up such settler sentiment.40 Whereas the colonial government financed Korean education, the author writes, settlers had to bear the cost of their children’s education on their own through residents’ associations or school associations. And yet, the school facilities for the Japanese, “supposed paragons and leaders for the Koreans,” paled miserably in comparison to the newly built modem school facilities for the Koreans. Contrary to the general assumption, the author goes on, many Japanese migrants were in fact “economically feeble,” and the power relations between Japanese and Koreans were “reversed” in many rural areas. In one village, he even happened to witness a Japanese child receiving left-over food from a Korean resident, stirring the author to question “how can we even talk about assimilating the Koreans, when we the Japanese beg for Korean sympathy and invite their contempt?”41 Such invidious comparisons were frequently made by Japanese settlers who tended to overplay the conditions o f their misery and view any perceived “gain” in Korean status as their loss. Terauchi himself had a very low opinion of settlers in Korea. In an interview conducted by Shakuo Shunjo of the Chosen oyobi Manshu in early April 1915, Terauchi complained that settlers had the worst record in tax payment and many o f them still harbored “get-rich-quick dreams (ikkaku senkiri),” berating settler usurers in particular. He bemoaned that the settlers merely displayed “arrogance” and “no aspirations to assimilate and enlighten

40 Chosensei, “Sotoku seiji no kekkan: suteraretaru Nihonjin,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, March 1913, 7-9. 41 Shakuo Shunjo expressed similar discontent by exaggerating the disparities between settler community facilities and the newly created and officially financed schools and other public facilities for the Koreans, and chided the Government-General for unfairly giving priority to Korean welfare and ignoring the Japanese residents. Kyokuliosei, “Sotoku seiji ni okeru Chosenjin to Nihonjin” in Chosen oyobi Manshu 84 (July 1914), 2-6. Makiyama Kozo argued that along with Koreans and officials, civilian Japanese settlers should be granted proper recognition for their contribution to the development of Korea. “Chosen keihatsu ni koken shitaru minkan jinshi no koro o hyosho subeshi,” Chosen Koron (December 1913), 6-7.

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the Koreans,” while “busying themselves with petty conflicts over honor and profit” and lacking in the spirit of “unity and harmony.”42 Terauchi’s disdain for settlers contrasted sharply with the self-image of settlers as “pioneers o f Korean progress.” Indeed, the settler leaders increasingly felt they were losing their leverage as grass­ roots agents of empire. The formal annexation ended the period o f settler political activism and adventurism, while expelling rightwing gadflies like Uchida Ryohei and other ruffians from the peninsula. Terauchi’s military rule also fostered a new level o f tension and mutual skepticism between officials and civilians who frequently accused the former of “kanson minpi” (“revering the officials and belittling the people”). As a result, the settlers’ status within the empire became more ambivalent. Although they were vested with a mission to assist the officials in “enlightening and civilizing” the Koreans, settlers too became subjugated to the uniform authority o f the Governor-General who suppressed the political rights and freedom o f local residents altogether. To the settlers’ dismay, Terauchi’s coercive assimilation policy and his effort to co-opt the Korean elite also threatened to destabilize the boundaries between colonizer and colonized that sustained the structure of settler privilege in Korea. Ironically, then, the formal annexation o f Korea marked the beginning of the end of settler autonomy. Terauchi at once started dismantling the system of residents’ associations, absorbing all their functions into the Government-General. To forestall the diffusion of criticism o f the colonial government and the notion of self-rule to the Koreans, moreover, Terauchi placed both Japanese and Korean residents under the same administrative control in public speech, press, business and commerce, land ownership, and overseas migration—with

42 “Terauchi Sotoku to kataru,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, May 1915, 5-7.

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due respect to the principle o f assimilation.43 The raison d ’etre of settler self-rule was also severely undercut by the termination of the treaty ports and the foreign settlements as a result of the foreign treaties revision in 1911.44 Predictably, Terauchi’s coercive assimilation policy provoked howls of protest from the settlers, who abhorred the prospect of being treated on the same level as the Koreans. The settlers claimed that “an irreducible gap” lay between the “superior” Japanese and the “uncivilized” Koreans in terms of their “levels of culture (mindo).”45 In response to the news of abolition, the settler leaders quickly rose in defense of their “thirty years” of selfgovernment nurtured through the residents’ associations, many of which preceded the creation o f the system of local government in Japan 46 Representatives o f resident associations around the peninsula gathered at a conference in 1912 to form a united front, and dispatched lobbyists to Tokyo to plead with the home government.47 Local residents’ associations also sent a battery of petitions to the Governor-General as well as the Prime Minister, key ministers, and chairmen of both houses of the Diet, demanding their 43 But in each of these categories, separate sets of “laws (horei)” and “regulations (kisoku)” were applied to settlers and Koreans respectively, and some metropolitan laws were only extended to settlers. In the case of censorship control, for instance, the Newspaper Regulations (Shinbunshi kisoku, April 1908) was applied to settlers whereas the Newspaper Law (Shinbunshi ho, July 1907) was applied to Koreans. Likewise, The Publication Regulations (Shuppan kisoku, May 1910), based on the metropolitan publication laws, was applied to settlers, while the Publication Law (Shuppan ho, February 1909) was applied to Koreans. The laws applied only to Koreans were issued by the former Korean government under Japanese advisors. Through this dual legal system, the authorities permitted a limited circulation of Japanese newspapers, while completely banning the Korean vernacular press. They also allowed settlers to publish magazines without obtaining official permission, which was required of all Korean publications. Chosen Sotokufu, Chosen horeishuran (Keijo [Seoul]: Teikoku Chiho Kyosei Gakkai Chosen Honbu), 1914 and 1915. 44 Duus, The Abacus, 362-63. 45 Zaisen Mindan Giin Rengokai to Prime Minister and others, petition, 25 November 1912, “Chinjosho,” in Saito Makoto bunsho, vol. 13 (repr,, Seoul: Koryd Sorim, 1990), 42-45. 46 Kang Jae-ho, Shokuminchi Chosen no chiho seido (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2001), 143. 47 Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 2, 896.

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recognition of “our proud heritage of self-rule in our constitutional history” and asserting their solidarity as “pioneers of continental development” and “public citizens” who shaped the future course of empire.48 Local journalists also ran numerous articles protesting the announced abolition of settler self-rule.

The New System o f Local Government The settlers’ protest was to no avail. Amid the clamor of dissenting leaders, the residents’ associations were finally abolished in 1914 and the scope o f settlers’ collective action cut drastically as a result. In their place, Terauchi installed a system of officially appointed city councils, which allowed a tiny number of local elites to participate in municipal governance. In October 1913, the Government-General enacted the Municipal Ordinance (fusei), along with the Revised Regulations on School Associations, to go into effect from the following April. The new system created twelve cities (fu) in the former locations of eleven residents’ associations and in Ch’ongjin of North Hamgyong Province which quickly developed into a major Japanese settlement since its port was opened in January 1908 49 In each fu, a city council (fukyogikai) was established as an advisory organ to the mayor (fuin),50 and its members were appointed by the provincial chief (do chokan).

48 Tanaka Hanshiro and others to Takahashi Shonosuke, 4 October 1913, “Kengi an,” in Saito Makoto bunsho, vol. 13, 37-41; “Zaisenjin chinjosho,” in Yomiuri Shinbun, July 2, 1912. 49 At the same time, the Government-General instituted a similar but a much more restricted system of myon (township/town) government in October 1917. Its jurisdiction was divided into regular towns and “designated towns” (chijong myon) that had greater numbers of Japanese residents, but no local advisory councils were created at the level of townships in the 1910s. For more details on the system of town government, see Kang Jae-ho, Shokuminchi Chosen, 168-170. 30 According to Kang Jae-ho, the authority o f fuin (K. puyun) was comparable to that of guncho (district chief) and chiji (prefectural governor) rather than shicho (mayor) in Japan, in that in addition to serving as a local bureaucrat of the Government-General, the fuin was placed in charge of administering and representing a fu as a local incorporation (chiho dantai hojin). Kang Jae-ho, Shokuminchi Chosen, 153.

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The main duty o f the city council was to discuss the enactment, revision, and abolition of municipal ordinances, the estimated budget, the issuance o f municipal bonds, and other matters related to municipal administration, at the mayor’s request. The number of councilors ranged from 6 to 16—the Seoul City Council had the largest number of 16. The ratio of Japanese to Korean members was equal (eight each) in Seoul, but uneven in other cities. In 1915, altogether 46 Koreans and 66 Japanese were appointed to the newly created city councils in twelve cities. The term of office in these “honorary posts” was two years. The Government-General appointed a carefully chosen group of local elites to the local councils, as well as to the posts of neighborhood heads (sodai) in the administrative units of cho and do created in 1916. These measures were designed both to appease the disgruntled settler leaders and to co-opt the Korean elites who were favorably disposed to Japanese rule.51 In the case of the Seoul City Council, seven out o f eight Japanese councilors were former executive members of the abolished residents’ association, while the overwhelming majority o f the Korean members were former high-ranking bureaucrats, including the former Interior Minister, Yu Kil-chun, who concurrently served as a municipal counselor (fusanji).52 By having the mayor preside over its meetings, the colonial government sought to prevent the city council from becoming a battleground for conflicting interests of local residents and to forestall ethnic confrontation between Korean and Japanese members as well.53 However, the newly created city council in Seoul ran into difficulty from the outset.

51 [Chosen Sotokufu], “Senkyo seido no enkaku narabini genjo,” n.d., ca. 1929, in Saito Makoto Kankei Bunsho [hereafter SMKB], shokan no bu (Kensei Shiryo Shitsu, Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan, Tokyo). 52 “Ninmei saretaru fukyogikaiin,” Chosen Koron, May 1914, 42-45; Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 2, 350. 53 Kang Jae-ho, Shokuminchi Chosen, 151.

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The mayor’s proposal to levy higher taxes on Japanese prostitutes than on Korean prostitutes, in accordance to their different “levels of civilization” and “wealth,” led to a “huge debate” dividing the city council members along ethnic lines. One member and journalist, Makiyama Kozo, blamed “this administrative difficulty” on the colonial policy o f assimilation and the government’s “extremely unnatural and illogical effort to rule the countrymen (bokokujin = Japanese) and the Koreans under the same system.”54 As mentioned earlier, the only area of settler autonomy left untouched by Terauchi was education. The Education Ordinance of 1911 was not applied to settlers, and Terauchi allowed the Japanese residents to continue to manage their children’s education through school associations (gakko kumiai). When the municipal system was inaugurated in 1914, a school association society {gakko kumiaikai) was set up as a legislative organ to handle exclusively settler educational affairs in each city.55 As a result o f the disappearance of residents’ associations, the election to school associations, which became the only self-ruling institutions along with chambers of commerce, became highly competitive.56 Many members of the Seoul School Association elected in June 1914 were politically active settler pioneers

54 Chosen Koron, June 1914, 52-53. 35 When school associations were first established to manage settlers’ primary and middle school education within Japanese settlements, they were empowered with self-ruling capacity and the right to incorporate by the Enforcement Regulations on the Residents’ Associations Law (Kyoryumindanho shiko kisoku, 1906) and the School Associations Law (Gakko kumiai rei, 1909). With the abolition o f residents’ associations in 1914, school association societies {gakko kumiaikai) were created as legislative organs on the management of settler education. For a M l text of the law, see “Gakko kumiairei no kaisei,” (announced on January 25) Chosen Sotokufu, Chosen Sotokufu shisei nenpo, 1913, 35-37; Keijo fushi vol.3, 70-75. For Koreans, a system of “school fees” (gakko hi) was set up by the Korea Education Ordinance (Chosen kyoiku rei, 1911) and the Ordinance on Public Normal school Fees (Koritsu futsugakko hiyo rei, 1911) to oversee the administration o f Korean primary education in officially established “normal schools.” Chosen Sotokufu shisei nenpo, 1911, 361-8. 56 At the first election held in Seoul in June 1914, prominent settlers vied for eighteen seats in the council. Each candidate represented and received support from a particular interest group, be it banks, corporations, doctors, drapers, contractors, transportation firms, lawyers, the Railway Bureau, or a local neighborhood. “Keijo kumiai kaigiin senkyo,” and “Kakuchi gakko kumiai kaigiin,” Chosen Koron, July 1914,46-50.

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like Yamaguchi Tahee, Soga Tsutomu, Tanaka Hanshiro, Ikeda Chobei, Yamato Yojiro, Omura Momozo, and Makiyama Kozo.57 At the first school association meeting on June 26, the settlers at once confronted the mayor on the issue of mixed education. They pressed him to explain why four Korean students were admitted to Japanese-run elementary schools, in complete disregard of the “law” and “the popular will” stated by the resident association’s earlier resolution that “mixed education of Japanese and Koreans must be absolutely forbidden.”58 Settlers’ complaints not only reflected their resistance to assimilation with Koreans, but also their financial burden of increasing school facilities to accommodate the growing number of Japanese children in the colony.59 Mixed education presented a particular challenge to vocational schools. The Zenrin Commercial School, founded by Okura Kihachiro in 1907 primarily for Koreans, was beleaguered by constant ethnic conflict between Korean students and Japanese students who were admitted to the school from 1913 onward, as well as accusations of discrimination on the part of Japanese teachers.60

57 Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 3, 75; Chosen Koron, July 1914, 46-50. 58 To this question, the mayor only promised to reply later. “Keijo gakko kumiai kaigi,” Chosen Koron, August 1914, 85. 59 In 1917, for instance, the eighteen newly elected members of the Seoul School Association petitioned the Government-General to increase its dwindling subsidy for their school association, so that they could raise the school teachers’ salary in response to the dramatically increased enrollment in 1918. The members included merchants like Kosugi Kinpachi, Ikeda Chobei, and Koezuka Shota, building contractors like Tanaka Hanshiro, and Yamato Yojiro, journalist Ogaki Takeo, and businessmen like Omura Momozo and Takayama Takayuki. Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 3, 462; “Gakko kumiai giin senkyo kekka,” Chosen Koron, July 1917, 95. 60 Seiha Kaiko Zenrin Shogyo Henshu Iinkai, ed., Seiha: Kaiko, Zenrin Shogyo (Fukuoka: Zenrin Shogyo Gakko Dosokai Seiha Kurabu, 1992), 111-112.

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Dual Structure in Everyday Life o f the Colony Settler resistance to assimilation also translated into their daily life, culture, and attitudes toward the Koreans. Indeed, under Terauchi’s assimilation policy, settlers assiduously sought to maintain a distinctly Japanese lifestyle to separate themselves from the colonized. As the Japanese settlement grew and became more entrenched in Korea, a dual structure emerged in Seoul, Pusan, and other cities spatially separating Japanese residential and commercial districts from the Korean ones, in contradiction to the spirit of assimilation.61 By the time of annexation, in Seoul a rough north-south divide had already emerged between the Japanese and Korean residential districts,62 a pattern that continued into the 1930s. The majority of Koreans lived to the north of Ch’onggyech’on, along the southern foot of the Pugaksan, and gradually moved outward to suburbs like Ch’ongniangni, Wangsimni, and Map’o. By contrast, the Japanese settlers were concentrated in land that sprawled from the slope of Namsan to Yongsan and stretched beyond Ch’onggyech’Sn. The Japanese settlement was marked by narrow streets of shops selling Japanese groceries and thatched-roof Japanese houses, and peppered with banks, companies, a post office, and other multi-storied Westemstyle buildings including the chamber of commerce, the Seoul Station, the Chosen Hotel, and the Mitsukoshi Department Store. In this tiny and densely inhabited strip of land, settlers self-consciously reproduced and maintained a lifestyle and a diet as close as possible to those of the metropole.63 The

61 Even after the old district system was abolished and new uniform administrative boundaries were imposed in 1914, separate names of “cho" and “do (K. tong)” continued to be used to distinguish between predominantly Japanese and Korean neighborhoods. Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 2, 536. For a foil list of Japanese “cho” and their etymology, see ibid., 536-540. 62 Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi vol. 3, 658. 63 Milk was almost entirely consumed by Japanese settlers in the early period. See Oka, Keijo hanjoki, 2578.

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Japanese settlers flaunted their higher “cultural level” vis-a-vis local Korean residents by building a more complete system of sewage, hygiene, and other public facilities.64 The use of tap water, gas, and electricity, considered as “a barometer of a country’s civilization,”65 spread more quickly among settlers than Koreans. Even in 1921, whereas 87 percent of Japanese households had electricity, only 20 percent of Korean households had electricity in the entire peninsula.66 By the mid-1910s, in fact, the average living standards of urban Japanese residents in Korea had surpassed that of metropolitan Japanese, as indicated by a higher number of electric lights and greater candlepower used per household.67 One Japanese gazetteer also contrasted the brightness of the Japanese commercial district, teeming with the entrepreneurial vigor of its inhabitants and well-lit with gas and electric lights, to the darkness of the Korean town marked by the lack of creativity, organization, and hygiene.68 Such a gap between the Japanese and Korean settlements was also frequently noted by visitors from home. Correspondents of metropolitan newspapers, for instance, observed that benefits of modernity and progress, allegedly brought to Korea by the GovernorGeneral’s rule, were not evenly distributed, and noted a stark gap in living standards between

64 For example, settlers established hygiene associations in 1912. Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 2, 890. In 1915, five years after annexation, Shakuo Shunjo compiled a list of racial statistics on the use of “cultural facilities,” including primary schools, communications (the use of postal and telegraph service, postal savings, and telephones), wager supply, and gas and electricity, for the purpose of comparing the “cultural levels” of Japanese and Korean residents. The list reveals a huge gap between the two communities. Chosen oyobi Manshu, October 1915, 9. 65 Mori Hideo, “Dento oyobi denki no juyo kara mitaru Keijofu no hattenburi,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, May 1927, 46. 66 Kimoto Soji, “Chosen denki jigyokai no shorai,” Chosen Koron, July 1923, 15. In the 1920s, however, the household and industrial use o f electricity increased dramatically. Mori Hideo, “Dento oyobi denki no juy5 kara mitaru Keijofu no hattenburi,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, May 1927, 46-47. 61 Chosen Denki Jigyoshi Henshu Iinkai, Chosen denki jigyoshi, 86-87. 68 Oka, Keijo hanjoki, 278-280.

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the Japanese urban residents who led a life “comparable to the cities in Japan” and the Koreans who lived in poverty and misery.69 Nonetheless, rather than living in hill stations or protective cocoons of bourgeois culture transplanted from the metropole, as many European colonists did in Asia and Africa, the Japanese migrants and settlers spread more widely and penetrated more deeply into local society. Japanese interaction with Koreans was marked by an uneasy balance between co­ habitation and separation, rather than a simple segregation that divided the colonizer from the colonized in all aspects of public life. As one metropolitan visitor to Seoul aptly observed, “Japanese and Koreans are living ‘together’ as if ‘water and oil’”70: settlers and Koreans physically lived side by side, but without interacting with each other on a social and cultural level, and the majority o f settlers never bothered to learn the Korean language or comprehend Korean culture and society. After annexation, settlers increasingly intruded into the Korean residential area, compelling many yangban residents to move to the countryside.71 Especially during WWI, wartime inflation and a continued rise in land prices caused a serious housing shortage, pushing Japanese settlers further into Korean residential areas: by 1919, almost every neighborhood (cho or do) of Seoul had some Japanese residents,72 causing occasional border disputes with Korean residents as well.73

69 Chosen oyobi Manshu, October 1915, 78, 80-81. 70 Watanabe Manabu and Umeda Masashi, eds., Bokyo Chosen, (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 1980), preface. 71 Chosen, January 1911, 91. 72 Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 3, 658. 73 Tsuchiya Kinosuke, “Tochi sokuryo no genkyo,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, October 1911, 51.

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Thus, Korea was often characterized as a “zakkyoteki (mixed-residence)”74 colony as compared to the Western colonies. This pattern of intruding into the territory of local inhabitants was more pronounced in the rural areas. For example, when a metropolitan magazine correspondent visited Ch’unch’on, located in the east o f Seoul, he saw how Korean-run stores were “caught" between Japanese-run sundry goods stores, drapers, and grocery stores characterized by “a ridiculously large frontage (maguchi),” “providing an amusing contrast.”75 One Government-General official also observed that whereas settlers in Seoul, P’yongyang, and other cities tended to discriminate against Koreans, the Japanese in the rural areas interacted with local Koreans more intimately and harmoniously.76 A few settlers apparently lived more poorly than the Koreans in some rural villages.77 Far from displaying “civilization,” moreover, many settlers had occupations that demonstrated their below-middle-class status. In mid-1911, for instance, o f 17,281 working Japanese in Seoul, 3,428 were government and public officials and employees, and 58 military officers and army civilian employees, who constituted the upper-class. By contrast, there were 1,478 shop clerks, 1055 servants, 683 employees (shoydnin), 609 artisans, 515 geisha and waitresses, 496 day laborers, 456 miscellaneous merchants, 290 laborers, and 158

74 Ishizuka Hidezo, “Shokuminchi no shigai keiei,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, September 1915, 58; “Keijo zakkan,” ibid., June 1915, 68. One settler characterized Korea as an “inter-stage colony” to describe the Japanese pattern of “intruding” into local Korean settlements. Nanzan Nyusoro shujin, “Keijo to Dairen” Chosen, May 1911,48. 75 Chosen oyobi Manshu, April 1915, 59. 76 Shiokawa Ichitaro, “Chiho shisatsudan,” Chosen, February 1911, 45. 77 For instance, see “Konan-sen ryokoki,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, February 1915, 86. Interviews with former Japanese settlers and Korean residents of colonial Seoul also confirm that many Japanese in the rural areas lived very poorly even in the 1930s.

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rickshaw pullers, who made up a low-class and larger group o f Japanese settlers.78 During the time of depression in 1915, there were also nearly one thousand unemployed Japanese in Seoul.79 The settlers in Korea, indeed, represented the entire hierarchy of social classes, with a large category o f low-class Japanese, and constituted a microcosm of metropolitan Japanese society itself. This pattern of settlement resembled that of French Algeria, and differed from those of many European colonies such as India, where a minority of settlers, mainly bureaucrats, military officials, company employees, and their families, maintained an upperclass European lifestyle in the colony.

Everyday life interactions Despite their resistance to assimilation, the settlers’ economic conditions and activities, compounded by the imperatives of assimilation policy, required them to interact with Koreans on a daily basis. Some settler stores relied on the patronage of elite Korean customers. Although settlers and Koreans tended to shop in separate commercial districts— Flonmachi and Kogane-machi for Japanese residents and Chongno for Korean residents— upper-class Koreans often shopped at Japanese stores too. Well-to-do Koreans bought Western suits and accessories, including hats, shirts, shoes, and silk and cotton handkerchiefs, as well as a range of Western imported groceries from Japanese merchants.80 One Japanese tailor in Seoul enjoyed the patronage of the Yi Royal Household and focused on expanding 78 Keijo Kyoryumindan Yakusho, Keijo hattatsushi, 430-435. One journalist points out the “lack of morality” among the majority of 3,000 or so Japanese servants (hokonin) working in Seoul’s commercial establishments. Chosen oyobi Manshu, September 1914, 99. 79 Chosen oyobi Manshu, April 1915, 8. 80 “Hakurai zakka oyobi shokuryohin ni taisuru Chosenjin no juyo,” Chosen, April 1910, 83-85. For instance, Chojiya was especially patronized by the Korean elites. Already in 1910, one-third of Chojiya’s customers were Korean and they were increasing in number. “Keijo saimatsu no shokyo,” Chosen, December 1910, 65.

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his Korean clientele (60 percent of his customers were already Korean), who purchased “expensive items that even the Japanese could not afford.”81 Another prominent Western grocer, Shin Tatsuma, recalled that “the Korean purchasing power far surpassed that o f the Japanese after the Russo-Japanese War,”82 and described how the Koreans “loved new trendy goods more than the Japanese did.”83 And yet, Koreans of all social classes experienced settler discrimination on a daily basis. For instance, Korean clergymen, after coming back from their sightseeing trip to Japan, expressed their surprise at how the settlers’ contemptuous treatment o f Koreans as “low-class animals” sharply contrasted with the “kindness of Japanese in the home country.” They also described how “unpleasant” they felt about going into the Japanese town, where even the most respected Korean elites were “received with a contemptuous look” by settlers, who would “tell [them] to leave with an angry look if standing at a loss in front o f the store.”84 The most notorious, apparently, were upper-class settler women who tended to mistreat their Korean housemaids.85 Whether the settlers liked it or not, however, the use of public transportation and public facilities was not segregated.86 In contrast to settler colonies in Africa where the

81 “Tokan no doki to kaitaku,” Chosen, April 1910, 83, 82 “Hakurai zakka,” 84. 83 “The most extravagant among the Koreans” was apparently Song Pyong-jun, whose pattern of purchasing cigarettes, wine, and brandy was comparable to that of the former resident-general, Ito Hirobumi. Ibid. 84 Chosen, September 1911, 23. 85 Chosen oyobi Manshu, February 1933, 119. 86 In Seoul, for instance, 60-70 percent of the passengers on the city’s trams were reportedly Korean and 30-40 percent Japanese. Ibid., May 1915, 89.

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indigenous population was barred from buses, taxis, clubs, and other public facilities used exclusively by white settlers, in Korea the diffusion and sharing of these facilities was actively promoted by the authorities as a means of assimilating, and exerting a “civilizing” influence on, the Koreans. For instance, one local Japanese official emphasized the creation of hygiene facilities, parks, theaters, and hobbies as a long-term Japanese social project to spread the concept o f hygiene, an awareness of “communal living,” and habits of “hard work and thrift” among Koreans.87 In Seoul, settler leaders, together with Korean elites, formed the Hansong Wisaenghoe (J. Kanjo Eiseikai) in charge of waste collection and removal, the provision of public toilets, and cleaning of roads and sewage, and carried out a city-wide cleaning campaign every April and October in accordance with the Hygiene Law.88 Given that more than 60 percent of policemen (junsa) were Koreans, moreover, it is not difficult to imagine that settlers had to interact with Koreans in carrying out a wide range of communal duties on a daily basis.

Settler culture and lifestyle Nonetheless, settlers developed a distinctively “colonial” culture that revolved around shops, shrines, and pleasure quarters (yukaku), from which the majority o f Koreans were excluded. First of all, the settler culture was marked by luxury, as epitomized by the extravagant lifestyle among upper-class Japanese women. In particular, the flamboyant lifestyle of wives o f colonial officials o f all ranks, whose favorite pastime was shopping at Mitsukoshi and local drapers, was said to be comparable to that o f high-ranking bureaucrats

87 Shiokawa Ichitaro, “Chosenjin ni taisuru goraku kikan no setsubi to kairyo o hakare,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, May 1911, 16-18. 88 Mankan no Jitsugyo (Mankan Jitsugyo Kyokai), vol. 50; “Shinai daiseiketsuho shiko,” Morita Fukutaro, ed., Pusanyoran (Pusan: Pusan Shogyo Kaigisho, 1912), 93.

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in the metropole. Every time the Patriotic Women’s Association held a general assembly, it was said, all luxury items at Mitsukoshi would be sold out.89 As one metropolitan female visitor also observed, the Japanese in Seoul were “youthfully dressed” and their patterns of kimono “gaudy”— “more than ten years” younger than what the metropolitan Japanese would wear. 90 O f course, not all settlers could enjoy the same level o f luxury. For example, upperclass Japanese in cities often converted part of their residence into a Westem-style house with complete heating facilities and combined it with a Japanese-style house. By contrast, middleclass and lower-class Japanese tended to live in existing Korean houses with ondol (heated floor).91 Nonetheless, middle-class settlers also used Korean house maids, and no class difference existed in the high settler consumption of alcohol and cigarettes, both of which were relatively cheap in Korea.92 The settlers also built their own world of entertainment. Oike Tadasuke and other prominent settlers in Pusan, for instance, collected money and dispatched people to Osaka or invited architects to build several large theaters, which featured quintessential Japanese plays, such as so ski (patriots) dramas, naniwa-bushi (stories of loyalty and human sentiment accompanied by samisen), and joruri puppet shows.93 In the 1910s, movies became another

89 Koryo joshi, “Keijo no fujinkai,” Chosen Koron, March 1914, 80. 90 Chosen oyobi Manshu, September, 1914, 101. 91 For example, in 1912 more than one out of seven Japanese who lived in Namp’o of Chinnamp’o lived in Korean-style houses. “Chosen mondo,” ibid., April 1912, 91. 92 Chosen, July 1911, 83. 93 For example, in 1907 the powerful merchants in Pusan, Oike Tadasuke and Goshima Jinkichi, established the Pusan-za, which was a three-storied theater with the capacity to seat 1,540 people (and at the time the largest theater in Manchuria and Korea). “Pusan-za,” Chosen no jitsugyo (Chosen Jitugyo Kyokai), August 1907, 47-48.

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popular form of entertainment: Seoul had four movie theaters, which showed films imported from the metropole and supplied silent-film narrators.94 In the absence of many other cultural and leisure facilities,95 however, Japanese entertainment centered on pleasure quarters, which were established by settlers in Pusan in 1900, in In’chon in 1902, and in Seoul in 1905.96 In 1916, the Government-General issued the Regulations concerning Control of Brothels and Prostitutes, which basically transplanted the metropolitan system of licensed prostitution.97 In Seoul, as a result o f these regulations, the Japanese-run brothels concentrated in the officially designated districts of Shinmachi and Yayoi-machi, whereas Korean-run brothels concentrated in Nishishiken-machi, Namiki-machi, and Oshima-machi, though many private prostitutes also existed throughout the city.98 The presence of Japanese prostitutes, who outnumbered the Korean prostitutes until the 1920s, suggests that settlers tended to visit the former, but young Japanese shop clerks apparently frequented low-class Korean prostitutes who charged lower fees than their Japanese counterparts.99

94 Mankan no Jitsugyo, vol. 96; Chosen oyobi Manshu, vol. 103, vol. 170. 95 Settlers frequently demanded the authorities to create more cultural facilities. For example, see Chosen oyobi Manshu, March 1912, 45-58. 96 Hashiya Hiroshi, Teikoku Nihon to shokumin toshi, 98. For the history of licensed prostitution quarters in Seoul, see “Keijo karyukai ryakushi,” Chosen oyobi Manshu, November 1921, 117-121. 97 Song Yon-ok, “Nihon no shokuminchi shihai to kokkateki kanri baishun,” Chosenshi Kenkyukai ronbunshu 32 (October 1994): 37-88. Song in another article, “Shokuminchi shihai ni okeru koshosei” (Nihonshi Kenkyu 371 (July 1993): 52-66), also argues that the structure o f prostitution was amenable for nurturing pro-Japanese collaborators. 98 According to the official survey completed in late 1915, there were 3,713 Japanese prostitutes and 1,271 Korean prostitutes, and 4 foreign prostitutes (total 5,068) in Korea. In Keijo alone, there were 554 Japanese prostitutes, 320 Korean prostitutes, and 4 foreign prostitutes (879 in total). The Japanese prostitutes resided in Shinmachi (399) and Yayoicho (55). Keijo-fu, Keijo fushi, vol. 3, 339-342. 99 One reader of the Chosen oyobi Manshu argued that a certain district should be designated for Korean prostitutes as well. Chosen oyobi Manshu, March 1914, 76. One enterprising kisaeng opened a sukiyaki restaurant by availing herself of extensive Japanese patronage. Ibid., January 1915, 140-147.

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Settlers also built Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines to enhance their spiritual life, which sharply contrasted with the religious orientation of Koreans dominated by Christianity.100 The overwhelming majority o f Japanese settlers were Buddhist: at the end of 1909, there were 34,365 Buddhists, 3,825 Shintoists, and 496 Christians officially recorded in the thirteen cities of Korea.101 Japanese Buddhists primarily targeted their missionary effort at settlers, and failed to win many converts among the Korean population.102 Many settler merchants also constructed Buddhist temples in their settlements. For instance, Nakamura Saizo, together with forty-odd local residents, built a Sodo sect temple in 1916, while in the same year Yamaguchi Tahee built a Shinshu Honganji sect temple.103 By the time of annexation, each major Japanese settlement (Pusan, Masan, Kunsan, Keijo, Chinnamp’o, and Wonsan) had several Shinto shrines and many Buddhist temples. Settlers also held a number of Shinto rituals and festivals throughout the year. For instance, a memorial service (shokonsai) held in Seoul in 1906 included a noon ceremony for a garrison stationed in Seoul, firing of blanks by the artillery, opening o f street stalls, a settlers’ celebration with three shouts of “Emperor banzai ” a banquet in Namsan Park, a garden party at a local official’s place (again with three shouts of “Emperor banzai”), and a joint official-civilian dinner party at the Resident-General’s residence to conclude the service.104 Settlers and officials also celebrated the New Year’s Shihohai, Kigensetsu

100 “chQggjj nj 0keru ]