A History of Korea (66 page)

Although the March First Movement failed to win Western powers’ support for Korean independence, it awakened an independence-oriented Korean nationalism. The independence movement led, in particular, to the establishment of provisional governments of Koreans. These were organized in Vladivostok on 17 March 1919, in Shanghai on 11 April 1919, and in Seoul on 23 April 1919. Provisional governments were established in three different locations almost
simultaneously, because at the time Korean nationalists believed that leadership was essential in the independence struggle. The provisional government in Seoul, the so-called Hans
ŏ
ng Provisional Government, in which all 13 Korean provinces were represented, proclaimed Korean independence, asking Japan to end its colonial rule and withdraw from Korea, thus posing a direct challenge to the entire Japanese colonial system. After being notified that a provisional government had been formed in Shanghai, known as the Korean Provisional Government, the provisional government in Vladivostok, called the National Council of Korea, attempted to integrate its activities with those of the Shanghai group. When the Hans
ŏ
ng Provisional Government in Seoul and the National Council of Korea in Vladivostok were integrated into the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai on 15 September 1919, a united provisional government was finally formed to serve as the representative organization of the Korean people.

To establish the Korean Provisional Government, socialist-inclined nationalists and moderate-conservative nationalists temporarily aligned. The former advocated armed struggle against Japan, whereas the latter preferred peaceful means of resistance, particularly diplomatic approaches effected through Western powers. The Korean nationalists, including Syngman Rhee, Kim Kyu-sik, Yi Tong-hwi, and Y
ŏ
Un-hy
ŏ
ng, all participated in forming the cabinet, and all of them would play important roles in modern Korean history.

The Korean Provisional Government was created not to restore the old monarchy but as a republic guaranteeing the people an elected government with a president and legislature; freedom of speech, assembly, press, and religion; and separation of state and religion. The Korean Provisional Government was weakened, however, by its difficulty in maintaining contact with the home-land, as well as a lack of significant international support, and, above all, by the ideological left-right split among nationalists fueled by Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

On 1 March 1919 the disparate strands of Korean nationalism coalesced in massive demonstrations against Japanese rule. Despite enormous sacrifices, however, independence was still not achieved, though the movement did foster a spirit of independence among the Koreans and brought about the Korean Provisional Government. Despite its many weaknesses, this was a government lawfully striving for Korea’s independence. The government of the current Republic of Korea prides itself on successfully attaining the legitimacy of the former Korean Provisional Government.

The March First Movement forced the Japanese to reassess their colonial policy in Korea, and, finally, they modified certain aspects of their colonial policy. Japan’s efforts to change its colonial rule in Korea was closely related to new political currents within Japan. Wartime prosperity and its victory in World War I brought a more liberal spirit to Japanese politics. The inauguration of the Hara Kei cabinet, in 1918, opened a new era in Japanese politics, often referred to as “Taisho Democracy,” during the first half of the 1920s. A civilian party politician, Hara revealed his distaste for military-oriented colonial rule in Korea.
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Finally, in August 1919, Japan announced the reshaping of its colonial rule in Korea: the harsh face of military-oriented rule under Governor-Generals Terauch Masatake (1910–1916) and Hasegawa Yoshimichi (1916–1919) was replaced by the softer appearance of Admiral Saito Makoto’s rule. Saito proclaimed a number of policy changes known collectively as the “Cultural Policy.”

The new policy included five major changes: no longer was it required that the post of governor-general be appointed from active-duty generals or admirals; the gendarmerie police system was replaced by the ordinary police system, and government officials and schoolteachers no longer had to wear uniforms or carry swords; freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association was granted but with limitations; educational opportunities for Koreans were expanded; and Korean cultural self-expression was allowed some free reign.

The new policy proved to be a fraudulent strategy, however. Not one single civil official was appointed as governor-general among six who succeeded Saito Makoto;
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only generals or admirals in active service were his successors. Further, despite the proclaimed change in the police system, Japan actually reinforced police strength by integrating military policemen into the ordinary police force. Because public order was the first priority among the Japanese, a police force was stationed in every local district in Korea. Saito was also determined to frustrate any anti-Japanese activity, and so, in May 1925, the Government-General promulgated the Peace Preservation Law, which, quite effectively, put an end to anti-Japanese newspapers, assemblies, and associations. Within Korea, even minor pro-independence activity was closely watched and harshly suppressed.

Japan’s legal foundation to control publications in Korea began with the Newspaper Law of 1907 and the Publication Law of 1909, enacted by the Japanese
during the protectorate period. From 1910 to 1919, a time historians call the “dark period,” no Korean newspapers managed by Koreans were permitted. Beginning in 1920, however, Japanese control over newspapers seemed to ease, and the Korean-owned newspapers the
Tonga ilbo,
or East Asia Daily, and the
Chos
ŏ
n ilbo,
or Morning Calm Daily, were founded in that year, followed by the
Sidae ilbo,
or Current Daily, in 1924. Still, rigid censorship was exercised on every word and phrase, and the deletion of text, confiscation of papers, levying of fines, and suspension of publication were frequent occurrences. For example, when 28 U.S. Congressmen and their families stopped in Seoul for a brief visit in late 1920 while embarked on a visit to China, the
Chos
ŏ
n ilbo
described their visit to Korea as a “law of nature” and subsequently the paper was banned for a week by the Government-General. Clearly the easing of controls on newspapers was for appearances only; the real intention was to mollify international critics and spy on Koreans who held anti-Japanese opinions. Similarly, allowing Koreans the freedom of assembly and association was primarily a way to form pro-Japanese organizations and win over pro-Japanese collaborators.

Another sham was the widely advertised expansion of educational opportunities for Koreans, as, in reality, the previous discriminatory practices continued as before. An education ordinance enacted in 1922 stipulated that Koreans would not be discriminated against in education. In 1924 the Japanese established Ky
ŏ
ngs
ŏ
ng Imperial University, present-day Seoul National University, and allocated about one-third of its student quorum to Koreans.
⁷
Elementary education and industrial education were also expanded, but no more than 18 percent of school-aged children attended elementary schools. Moreover, education was directed only at assimilating Korea’s culture and way of life to Japan’s. Although, as noted, Japan did allow Koreans some freedom to restore and defend their culture against Japanese encroachment, the new Japanese policy sought to eliminate entirely the Korean spirit of independence. Thus, in 1922, the Japanese established the Korean History Compilation Committee and published a 35-volume
Korean History
in 1937, which seriously distorted Korean history. In so doing, the Japanese aimed to negate the national consciousness and autonomous spirit of the Korean people, as well as their historical traditions. Simply put, Japan’s new “Cultural Policy” was a deceitful moderation of its earlier government by bayonet, designed only to blunt international criticism of Japan’s harsh, military-oriented colonial rule.

As a colony of the expanding Japanese empire, Korea was primarily a source of raw materials and food, but it also provided markets for Japan’s industrial development. With little interest in the economic development of Korea, Japan continuously exploited Korea’s resources at the expense of most Koreans’ livelihood.

At the time of annexation, Korea was an overwhelmingly agrarian economy, and so Japan’s initial economic policy there was to increase agricultural production to meet Japan’s growing need for rice. In the late 1910s, Japan was experiencing a severe crisis in food supply as a result of maladjustments in its rapidly industrializing economy. In 1918 the price of rice skyrocketed, leading to serious social unrest. Finally, rice riots broke out in many parts of Japan in August of that year. As Japanese demand for rice sharply increased, Korea became a rice-based colonial economy tightly controlled in the interests of creating a rice surplus to feed Japan. Beginning in the 1920s huge quantities of Korean rice were shipped to Japan; in the period between 1932 and 1936 the amount of rice exported reached the point where more than half of Korea’s total rice production was sent to Japan. As a result, many Koreans had to consume grain substitutes such as barley, sorghum, and millet.

Living conditions for Korea’s peasants had seriously deteriorated, with crushing poverty and debt, demanding nothing less than a radical change in the structure of Korea’s centuries-old land relations, in which privately owned land was concentrated in the hands of relatively few large landowners. Peasant cultivators were either small holders and tenants or laborers. The Japanese annexation of Korea not only did nothing to alter this structure to improve the peasants’ economic status; instead, it encouraged the separation of ownership from actual cultivation of land, which resulted in large-scale absentee landlordism.

As the concentration of landholdings in increasingly fewer hands became the trend, farm tenancy rapidly increased. The rate of Korean farmers owning no farmland rose from 37.7 percent in 1918 to 53.8 percent in 1932. By 1938 less than 20 percent of farmers owned all the land they tilled, about one-fourth owned some land and rented some, and farmers owning no land still amounted to over 50 percent.
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Landlessness always makes farmers less self-sufficient. The inequitable distribution of farmland caused great misery to tenants, for as the number
of tenants increased and thus sharpened competition for land among tenants, tenancy rents became exorbitant. Generally, in previous years, tenant farmers paid rents amounting to 50 percent of the crop, but during the 1930s these rents in southern Korea ran up to 80 percent of the yield and were among the highest rents in the world. Keen competition among tenants made tenant farming almost a privilege. Many of the lease contracts for land were for a period of just one year, and so tenants faced constant renegotiations of leases, which caused utter insecurity for tenant families. The miserable tenancy conditions depressed Korean agriculture as a whole as well as the tenants themselves. With no promise of tenure on the land beyond a year’s lease, tenants made no improvements on the land, nor could they conserve land and resources for increased production.

The destitution of Korean peasants was beyond description. Especially in the period termed “spring suffering,” before the summer harvest of barley, they were periodically on the brink of starvation. Already burdened with huge debts, most of them endured food shortages and had to maintain life by searching for edible weeds, roots, and barks on the hillsides, which led the peasants to feel hopeless and see no point in working.
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Koreans living in urban areas were no better off than those in the countryside. Some 80 percent of urban dwellers were poverty-stricken, and Koreans received wages less than half the amount of their Japanese counterparts.

After the March First Movement major Japanese business interests supported modifications to colonial policy in Korea not out of altruism but out of self-interest. They sought to relax restrictions on business transactions in Korea to expand the market for their surplus capital. Korea offered a more favorable investment climate compared to Japan, as Korean workers were paid less than half of what Japan’s competitors were paid, and they worked longer hours (more than ten hours a day). In 1920 the Government-General rescinded an ordinance enacted in 1910, so that now companies only needed to register with the Government-General but no longer needed its approval. Soon large-scale investments of Japanese capital were made in Korea. In 1926 the Japanese established the Chosen Hydroelectric Power Company, which developed a site on the Puj
ŏ
n River, a tributary of the Yalu, in South Hamgy
ŏ
ng province. The following year the Chosen Nitrogenous Fertilizer Company was founded at H
ŭ
ngnam in the same province, where it could utilize the new, cheap power supply on the Puj
ŏ
n River. This spurred considerable urban growth in H
ŭ
ngnam, one of the
earliest planned cities in the region. Soon it became the largest industrial center in Korea. The outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in 1931 further accelerated Japanese investment in Korea. Because of the increasing Japanese emphasis on industrialization, the number and distribution of Japanese manufacturing industries grew rapidly.

Koreans benefited little from the developing economy, which was designed to serve the Japanese homeland. Heavy industry was limited mainly to developing raw materials, especially mineral resources, and producing war supplies. The Japanese monopolized all the key positions in the colonial government and business sectors, with few Koreans allowed access to the basic skills essential for the industrialization and modernization of their country.