CHAPTER 2 The Colonial Origins of Neofamilism

Two diametrically opposed paradigms—orthodox and revisionist—have long dominated the study of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910–45). The orthodox interpretation, well known for its nationalist coloration, focuses on political dependency and arbitrariness, social control, discrimination, repression, economic exploitation, and the loss of cultural identity. Here the Korean Peninsula is considered nothing but a source of grain supply and industrial resources for Japanese economic development, as well as cheap (forced) Korean labor.¹ The orthodox approach argues that Korean traditions and cultural practices were suppressed under colonial rule, to the extent that Korean identity was severely threatened.² Any change in the colonial economy was thus “development without development,” which was not relevant to Korea.³

The revisionist approach focuses on positive economic change, along with modern sociocultural influences spurred by Japanese rule. This view started against the background of South Korea’s economic development since the mid-1960s with an intent to look for the colonial sources of development. Colonial rule is thus seen as the period in which modern capitalism was introduced and in which, regardless of the political context, the Korean economy developed.⁴ Criticizing the orthodox interpretation as too nationalistic, revisionists argue that colonial rule left such legacies as capital and infrastructure accumulation, as well as a strong state and its modern bureaucracy, all of which became instrumental in designing and implementing Korean economic development plans during the 1960s.⁵

Despite fundamental differences, the two approaches share common methodological and substantive assumptions. The binary opposition between colonial exploitation and development does not allow room to understand the macro picture of the colonial Korean society and institutional developments, with its contradictory and uneven effects. Also, both are monosectoral in their scope of analysis focusing on a single sector, whether economic, social, or political issues, although they are primarily focused on economics. Each has also conducted a “war of case studies,” typical of monosectoral analysis, in which one case of exploitation is countered by another case of development.⁶ The two approaches lack a theoretical framework within which to understand the broader institutional and social consequences of colonial rule.

The exploitation-centered orthodox approach rightly emphasizes the suffering imposed by discrimination and physical and psychological controls, but it is not clear what the enduring psychological, institutional, and social consequences of this suffering are. In fact, most such studies are limited only to the colonial period itself.⁷ Problems with the revisionist approach are equally serious. Revisionist research proceeds as if dealing with the economic sector per se is tantamount to dealing with the societal whole. It is overly reliant upon Western sociological concepts and categories to characterize Korean colonial society and thereby fails to acknowledge the unique aspects of Korean colonial society.⁸ By linking the institutions of the colonial era to those in present-day Korea—that is, a strong state, economic development, and the emergence of management styles—revisionists commit the error of “reverse teleology,” or reading history backward.⁹ The studies cannot do justice to the complex nature of colonial institutions and societies as they actually existed because their interest in the colonial society of Korea is limited to explaining postcolonial economic development. It is not surprising, therefore, that revisionist studies have not paid attention to social institutions developed during the colonial era and how they have affected both society and subsequent patterns of economic development in Korea.

Efforts have been made to overcome the dichotomous views of colonial Korea by focusing on the more complex interplays of the colonial rule and society as a whole. Some studies have sought to understand colonial complexity in which different forces interacted, frequently causing unintended consequences.¹⁰ This approach focuses on these interactions within colonial Korea and criticizes the orthodox school’s exclusive focus on nationalistic interpretations of colonial social changes. These studies argue instead that colonial society was involved in constant negotiations and contestations among the national, colonial, and modern arenas. It attempts to show how the Korean people, though limited in leverage as individuals, were not simply coerced but interacted on their own volition with the other spheres. Thus, Japanese hegemony was viewed as not completely based on force.¹¹

Being critical of the exploitation-development dichotomy, the trichotomy approach is more open and less deterministic in assessing the impact of colonial rule; by trying to understand the complexity of the colonial rule through interactions between the colonial, national, and modern arenas, this approach acknowledges the primacy of one of the three elements depending on sectors and situations and is sensitive to the occurrence of unintended consequences. As one author states, the analysis of the consequences of industrialization under the colonial rule “liberates us from nationalistic bias and the illusion that modernization was unilaterally positive. It makes us think how nationalism, modernity, and colonialism functioned in colonial society, not just in political, anti-imperialistic terms, but as a more complex process of social, economic, and cultural change fostered by emerging colonial modernity.”¹²

The trichotomy approach provided a framework to understand colonial complexity, but as the approach is based on case studies to demonstrate the interactions among the national, colonial, and modern arenas, the analytical priority among the three is contingent and indeterminate, so it is not possible to formulate a macro conceptual framework. Since the interactions need to be analyzed in each case, such as education, labor relations, and administration, in terms of which among the three was predominant, this framework cannot provide a holistic picture of colonial society. That is, what is problematic in the trichotomy approach is the failure to recognize the centrality of the colonial compared to the modern and the national. It is clear from the previous discussion that Korean society under colonial rule has been understood and presented based on fragmented realities, and thus institutional legacies have not been systematically analyzed. This chapter, building on past monosectoral analyses, highlights the primacy of the colonial, rather than weighing it equally with the national and modern, and formulates a new conceptual framework to understand the distinct social changing patterns under colonial rule.

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: COLONIAL SPACE

Approaching the complexities of colonial experience requires a clear understanding of what exactly constitutes the colonial situation. Sociologist Georges Balandier’s remarks on Africa are still useful: “Any present-day study of colonial societies striving for an understanding of current realities and not a reconstitution of a purely historical nature, a study aiming at a comprehension of the condition as they are, not sacrificing facts for the convenience of some dogmatic schematization, can only be accomplished by taking into account this complex we have called the colonial situation.”¹³

Balandier itemizes the components of the colonial situation as follows:

1. Domination imposed by a racially (or ethnically) and culturally distinct foreign minority in the name of racial and cultural superiority.

2. The linking of radically different civilizations into some form of relationship.

3. A mechanized, industrialized society with a powerful economy, a fast tempo of life, and a Christian background imposing itself on a non-industrialized, “backward” society.

4. The fundamentally antagonistic character of the relationshipbetween two societies resulting from the subservient role to which the colonial people are subjected as “instruments” of the colonial power.

5. The need to retain essential dominance both by outright coercion and the creation of a system of pseudo-justification and stereotyped behavior.¹⁴

This summary contains accidental and essential elements, with only the latter being applicable to the Korean case. Thus, while “Christianity” is accidental, the essential elements of Japanese colonialism in Korea include foreign dominance, in which the domestic majority is controlled by a foreign and numerical minority with the intent of economic and strategic exploitation, based on overwhelming coercive force.

Balandier’s main concern—to remind us that ethnic components are crucial in understanding the colonial social whole in the African context—can be easily extrapolated to more general terms: to maintain discrimination through control, colonial authorities reserve the right to launch arbitrary interventions in any area of human action as the need for control arises. As a consequence, system boundaries among political, economic, and sociocultural activities become unclear and blurred under colonial control. Put differently, in the colonial situation, any activity can be made political through the colonial authorities’ pervasive politicizing of even mundane issues. Such formulations underscore the unique aspect of colonial social changes, particularly social distortions caused by a foreign minority’s rule over a local majority, discrimination, and an overwhelming reliance on force to maintain control.¹⁵

The blurring of system boundaries is closely related to colonial disequilibrium—the artificial blockage of intersystem spillover—which arises when conscious efforts are made to avert or forestall the flow of institutional change from one area into another. Without such efforts, control over the colony itself becomes difficult, if not impossible. For instance, colonial authorities permit economic activities only through prior considerations of political control and block the spontaneous emergence of social groups based on economic interactions. Thus, noncolonial differentiation among political, social, and economic sectors is artificially disrupted by an overarching imperial imperative and arbitrary political intrusion. According to sociologist P. Mercier, the most important factor in understanding postcolonial African society is the dilution of class relationships by the superimposition of the colonized/colonizer axis upon the subordinate society.¹⁶ In the African context, tribal and kinship ties are the most salient factors affecting social relations.¹⁷

Blurred system boundaries and the consequent artificial blockage of intersystem spillover mean that system boundaries can shift, and thus we have the difficulty of understanding colonial society in single macro-structural terms. Put differently, colonial society is potentially so fluid that it cannot be conceptualized by any single “total concept.”¹⁸ To approach the colonial situation as a whole means understanding that colonial society is based on this fluidity. Thus, efforts to understand any one element—particularly such essential elements as foreignness, imposition, control, and unnaturalness—and to generalize the whole therefrom will not produce an accurate picture. We cannot expect predictable social consequences under colonial rule due to the whimsical nature of colonial power. Religion, for example, under the non-colonial situation is a matter of social and cultural domains, but under the colonial situation it could easily become a political issue. This is what I refer to as blurred system boundaries. Extending this logic, under the colonial situation it is not easy to anticipate social changes out of economic actions as is the case under the non-colonial situation. The abnormally fragmented nature of colonial society emerges here as a conceptual constraint on the discussion of colonialism by postcolonial scholars, diverting understanding of the essential dysfunctionality of colonial/postcolonial society into endless and sterile intellectual debate on accidentals. Thus, it is necessary to examine the intended and unintended social and institutional consequences of blocking change from one sector to another.

While all colonial societies share colonial disequilibrium, the contents of social consequences are unique to each colonial society because of their different historical contexts and colonial experiences. The artificial blockage of flows between sectors forces the analyst of colonialism to forsake many standard social science concepts and formulate new and context-specific social categories to understand a given colonial society. Colonial control may prove to be the link, for example, between the introduction of an apparently modern institution and a totally different consequence in another area. Thus, if class formation were seriously skewed because of anticolonial nationalism, the situation might require a different conceptualization applicable to a skewed class society. The concept of “class” either is subsumed by a higher-level, colonialism- specific category or acquires new and variable meanings depending on the individual characteristics of the precolonial indigenous society. What is treated as an independent variable elsewhere becomes a dependent variable here. In addition, the fragmented nature of colonial society ensures that concepts of social cause and effect can no longer be taken for granted. Instead, causal determinants become a highly empirical enterprise.

Taking into account the factors of colonial situation, disequilibrium, and totality, our general framework here may be expressed as constituting a colonial space. In this context, colonial denotes the fact that the colonial power sets the priorities, makes decisions, and implements them according to its goals, which may or may not be relevant to a colonial society, and space indicates the general field of human interactions where systemic boundaries are fluid and blurred. The term colonial space is used to help us to understand the colonizer’s perception and imperative that colonial control involves and requires the uninhibited crossing of boundaries, in the same sense that a computer operator can freely erase and redraw his creations in cyberspace. Thus, in the non-colonial situation we may justly speak, for example, of political, social, or economic systems with relatively firm and definable boundaries. That is, space is used to denote a totality of living patterns where predictable system differentiation is inconceivable.

Colonial space therefore implies the usurpation of coherent structuration and system building through purposeful fragmentation and disequilibrium. Although there may be surface resemblances to economic or political space, these subordinated spaces are neither fixed nor stable. Whereas the non-colonial system is recognized and defined by its spontaneity, logic, and coherence, colonial space is recognized and definable by its artificiality, discontinuity, and arbitrariness. External coercion and control are substituted for integral necessity and organic development; force replaces the logic of cultural appropriateness. In colonial space, one cannot automatically rationalize or model any outcome according to necessary cause or effect. It is independent of human need and satisfies the latter only intermittently and accidentally. For this reason, it is meaningless to point to isolated instances in which indigenous populations may benefit accidentally from the arbitrary mechanisms and functions obtaining within colonial space.

In colonial space, foreign authorities manipulate system boundaries at will whenever their focus of interest and attention shifts, leaving the indigenous population helpless to affect the most fundamental conditions of their lives; colonial control is inconsistently and unevenly extractive, coercive, instrumental, and invidious, with shifting areas of benign neglect. At the same time, colonial authorities maintain artificial boundaries between one system and another depending on the outcomes of interactions with the colonized population. Colonial space in this sense is highly dynamic and volatile. Especially in the Korean context, where the old social structure was rapidly disintegrating, it was easier to block the emergence of such large-scale social units as class. Thus, colonial space produces groupings of people who share similar experiences but no organizational connections: they are arbitrarily grouped or regrouped according to their shifting functions within spaces defined by, and furthering the interests of, the colonial power.

The cumulative effect of such overwhelming arbitrariness on individuals, society, culture, and national and ethnic identity cannot be overestimated. More generally, the arbitrariness of colonial space preempts the possibility of acquiring a rational sense of cause and effect, divorces people’s actions from results, and preempts almost every possibility of developing a meaningful sense of self-as-actor. All of these are the legacies of every once-colonized people, including Koreans.

THE FUNCTIONAL STRUCTURE OF COLONIAL SPACE

Given the colonialism-specific logic just described, colonial space can be divided into three areas: colonial superstructural space, colonial functional space, and colonial social space. These spaces differ primarily in (1) the changing threat perception of the colonial authorities with respect to such elements (i.e., does a given element comprise a greater or lesser degree of accommodation or resistance?); and thus, (2) the scope and intensity of direct colonial control over the relevant elements, in which control is equivalent to arbitrary interference and thus increased disequilibrium within the affected element.

Colonial superstructural space (CSUS) is the space in which colonial authority attempts, within the inevitable constraints of material possibility, to establish its hegemony over the colonized and to inaugurate institutional, societal, and ideological arrangements to implement and maintain such hegemony. Examples of efforts to further Japanese hegemony include the Japanese equivalent of the “white man’s burden,” the concept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, tendentious distortions of Korean history, the attempt to assimilate the Korean people into Japan through Japan-Korea unity and identity, anthropological studies treating Korean people as “natives,” forcing Koreans to use Japanese names, and the imposition of Japanese emperor worship and the use of the Japanese language. Bureaucratic and other organizations that support such ideological impositions are also elements of CSUS. Acts associated with CSUS are undertaken where an element is crucial to the mechanisms of colonial control or where relatively less-essential elements are perceived to contain a relatively high degree of potential threat. In this sense, CSUS is the most colonial and least indigenous aspect of colonial space. Moreover, because high levels of surveillance and control over “normal” elements of an indigenous society are required to establish colonial hegemony, CSUS is innately hostile to indigenous institutions. CSUS is highly pragmatic and opportunistic, and thus its boundaries are exceptionally fluid and arbitrary, admitting blatant contradictions. For instance, the contradiction between treating Koreans both as cultural brothers deserving assimilation and as inferior “natives” never occurred to the Japanese colonizers, as indeed it need not have as long as the conclusion (the colonization of Korea) remained the same, irrespective of the premises.¹⁹

Colonial functional space (CFS) is the space in which the functional arrangements necessary to accomplish the primary goal of economic exploitation by the colonial power are made. It exists where the mechanisms of colonial society are either routine or the perceived threat level is low, or both. Here belong familiar phenomena, such as coerced economic policies and institutions, along with a coerced educational system and curriculum. CFS resembles sociologist Peter Ekeh’s category of migrated institutions in that it often combines such foreign structures as centralized educational systems or modern production practices with indigenous traditional systems or divisions of labor.²⁰ Thus, this is a space that differs little on the surface from similar structures in non-colonial situations. What makes CFS colonial, however, is that the functional goals and means of implementing policies are those of the colonizers, who are again those empowered to make such decisions. The overriding goal is to maximize economic exploitation within a highly controlled and thus stable and friendly environment. The means involve incentives to engage colonial people in economic efforts but within an overarching logic of discrimination and material control. The colonial power needs to educate the colonized population to pursue its economic goals cheaply, and it limits the goals of colonial education to suit this need. As one former French principal of an Algerian school expressed it, the goal of French colonial education was neither to transform Algerians into true French nor to permit them to remain true Algerians, but to land them in a nowhere zone somewhere in between.²¹

Since arbitrary intrusions of coercive power are relatively rare in this space and the perceived threat potential of its elements is tolerable, maximum interaction and dialectic between colonizer and colonized occur under CFS. Here objective functional needs common to all societies contend and conflict with the imperative of colonial control. Regardless of the given colonial situation, both the colonized and the colonizer must engage each other in this space, either for survival or for exploitation. The need for colonial control frequently contradicts the logical consequences of functional activities, such as industrialization and education. The unintended emergence of colonial modernity raises thorny issues of control. The colonial power has to deal with workers in materially modern factories and graduates of modern educational systems. Colonial education, however tightly or expertly controlled, inevitably creates challenges arising from the cognitive disjunction between colonial discrimination and universalism acquired through education.

Colonial social space (CSS) can be regarded as a residual space that the colonial power leaves least controlled after carving out its position in the other two spaces. Empirically, CSS contains the traditional sector, but as Ekeh points out, even if the degree of control is relatively minimal, the remaining traditional orders suffer qualitative changes. Thus, what constitutes CSS must be empirically defined in terms of time and place. In the Korean case, the family system is a good example of CSS. As will be discussed, Japanese colonial authorities left the Korean family system virtually intact, not because they wanted to protect it but because it was much more beneficial in terms of colonial control to do so.

BOUNDARY BLURRING, CATEGORICAL VARIABILITY, AND ACCOMMODATION/RESISTANCE

These three categories—CSUS, CFS, and CSS—constitute the logical abstractions most suitable for expressing the peculiar nature of colonial space. In employing them, it is above all necessary to avoid the trap of conceptual rigidity. Attempts to categorize instantly confront the blurring of boundaries discussed earlier, which is an intentional and invariant feature of colonial systems. It should be stressed that the colonial power alone is the ultimate definer of the specific content of colonial space. Depending upon the colonial power’s perception of colonial reality, spatial boundaries can move arbitrarily. This fluidity of boundaries makes it difficult to apply fixed sociological categories to the elements and makes each of them (e.g., religion) potentially a CSUS category. It is either the new goals set by the colonial power or the reactions of the colonized that determine new boundaries between the spaces without changing the fundamental imperative of economic exploitation. The fluidity defined by the colonial power is what prevents coherence between socioeconomic actions and socio-institutional consequences.

As noted, CSUS, CFS, and CSS are distinguished primarily by their innate importance to the colonizers and/or the perception of potential threat within subordinate colonial spaces. This raises the question of what constitutes the perception of threat in a colonial context. It is clear that colonial systems create a wide continuum on the axis of power, from the near powerlessness of the colonized to the vastly overextended power of the colonizer. In fact, within such systems there is only one primary category in which the colonized are guaranteed power to effect changes within the colonial system: the axis of accommodation/resistance. If the colonized accommodate, they ensure the stability of the colonial status quo (given that this stability is defined as the continuance of the colonizer’s ability to effect arbitrary systemic change unimpeded by consideration of the colonized). If they resist, they force the colonizer to address their resistance, thus adding another level of control to that characterizing the status quo and possibly increasing the cost of maintaining the colonial system. This is the only invariant axis along which the colonized may be ensured anything resembling “power” in a colonial system.

Accommodation among the colonized is defined as accepting the premises of colonial rule and thus not creating the need for negative sanctions from colonial authorities. Resistance is defined as refusing to acknowledge colonial rule and thus either launching a struggle against it or remaining aloof from it. Accommodating resistance involves a willingness to participate in colonial spaces but with the ultimate goal of resisting or rejecting colonial rule; resisting accommodation means accommodating reluctantly because one has no other choice or to exert passive resistance. Thus, each space has two types of social consequences: institutions that function to support the space and human groups surrounding the institutions. Following Ekeh, the nature of institutions can take traditional, migrated, and emergent forms.²²

In each kind of colonial space, responses are more or less clearly limited. CSUS, for example, largely empowers elite groups as it is defined by the colonial power. In this space, the colonized have limited options for reaction—either resistance or accommodation (collaboration)—largely because of the sensitivity of the colonial authorities to this space. From this space emerge nationalist groups who resist colonial control and collaborators who accommodate the colonial power. Here many different kinds of colonial institutions serve to promote justification of colonial rule, but all can be reduced to the category of colonial bureaucracy because almost all were implemented under its auspices.

In CFS, one can theoretically imagine four different kinds of reactions by the colonized: collaboration, accommodating resistance, resisting accommodation, or resistance. The predominant reaction pattern, however, is accommodating resistance. Since this space is about daily survival and gaining status, the colonized are obliged to accept reality. Once they are engaged in CFS, however, their reaction patterns among these four possible responses may vary, depending on their socioeconomic positions prior to colonial rule and their relationship with the colonial power. Even among capitalists under colonial rule there can exist different groups and orientations toward the colonial power. A uniquely conflicted and ambivalent ethos of Korean capitalists under colonial rule may also emerge, something not imaginable in a non-colonial situation: the feeling that they are betraying the nation, for example, is overshadowed by the justification that what they do ultimately serves to strengthen the nation. Workers whose jobs were created as a result of colonial economic changes are prevented from uniting to follow certain ideologies that may threaten colonial rule, and thus these workers’ organizations become fragmented. Workers themselves also develop a colonial ethos that requires them to consider national liberation and their own interests simultaneously.²³ Because there are different kinds of capital and worker groups, making generalizations about workers is extremely difficult. The institutions of capitalist and market systems are strongly colored by colonial control.

Colonial education produces an ironic predicament. Those who accept colonial schooling show accommodation in doing so, but a modern education gives them the tools to resist the colonial power, either overtly or covertly. Likewise, the colonial power needs educated people but cannot support the institutional principles that modern education purportedly supports, such as equality, justice, and autonomy. The result is a seemingly modern educational system that is strongly influenced by colonial control: separate from the progressive curriculum, it features punishment and a strong authoritarian relationship between teachers and students.

CSS encompasses those traditional social elements to which the colonial authorities are indifferent. This might be called resistant traditionalism, in which the colonized use elements of tradition as symbols of resistance while the colonial authorities use those same elements for purposes of control. If CSUS and CFS facilitate challenges to many traditional values and institutions, CSS reinforces tradition unintentionally, a fact that is normally not well understood in most nationalist historiography. In everyday life, it may take what sociologist Erving Goffman called “secondary adjustment” in the context of total institutions, such as prisons and mental hospitals, in which, without directly challenging the authorities, “forbidden satisfactions [are obtained or permitted] by forbidden means.”²⁴ CSS encompasses a majority of rural inhabitants, as well as the family system and the rural authority structure.

We have seen how complexity in the interactions between colonial rule and traditional institutions and values embodies numerous indeterminacies and contradictions. At a micro level, understanding the impact of colonial rule on tradition requires close examination of the intentions of the colonial rule and its consistency in relation to each case of traditional values and institutions. The macro picture regarding the relationship between colonial rule and indigenous traditions will take on a mosaic form in terms of degree of control and consequences.

EDUCATION IN COLONIZED KOREA

In analyzing education under colonial rule, the focus is not on detailing historical facts, but on how the colonial situation changed the institution. Colonial control constantly created contradictions between CSUS and CFS—that is, between colonial control and colonial modernity—and brought about long-lasting social consequences. In addition, traditional family ties, as discussed later, were paradoxically strengthened despite apparent socioeconomic changes. These examples help to explain the institutional legacies of the colonial era, especially in relation to Korean economic development. During rapid industrialization, strong high school and family ties were reinforced in Korean society and cannot be understood without examining their historical link to the colonial past.

Colonial Education, Colonial Control, and the Emergence of High School Ties

Within the threefold model outlined here, CSUS expresses most intensely the essential contradiction of the colonial situation. Colonial contradiction occurs wherever the strategies necessary for achieving the primary goal of economic exploitation automatically produce an increase in resistance from the colonized. Such contradictions are inevitable artifacts of the logic of colonialism. Contradiction is therefore the locus of conflict and transformation in the colonial context and the most obvious mechanism for generating unintended social consequences. An outstanding example of the contradictions inherent in CSUS is the institution of colonial education. In the Korean context, both the colonizer and the colonized needed formal education, but the educational enterprise took on contradictory significance for both sides. Education inevitably became one of the most intense fields of perceived threat to the Japanese authorities, as demonstrated by the broad scope of repressive measures taken against students and schools. This repression is what justifies locating education firmly within CSUS. More crucially, it was within the institution of education that the most uniquely Korean of postcolonial social artifacts was forged and refined—a network of social ties of mutual cooperation, trust, and assistance generated not between university students, as in Japan, but within high schools.

The colonizers needed an educated workforce to increase the usefulness of selected colonized persons and schools that would teach unquestioning respect for authority.²⁵ The colonized needed a modern education because it was one of the few paths to an economically successful life open to Korean people. The fact that the colonial power limited the number of educated Koreans speaks to Japanese sensitivity to the potential threat inherent in the educational process. Even though this strategy was designed to counter the contradictions of the colonial educational enterprise, it merely localized and intensified the paradox: “In fact, one of the functions of school selection was to make education scarce, thus increasing its value and the demand for it.”²⁶ Unsurprisingly, selection was biased in favor of colonial loyalty over academic excellence. For the colonial authority to maintain “proper social distance” from the colonized for colonial control along with explicit discriminatory measures, neither too much acculturation nor too much local orientation was allowed in selecting students. Thus, there existed inherent limits to any assimilation policy.²⁷

Nevertheless, the increased perceived value of education generated by this policy of creating an artificial scarcity could not help but also increase the perceived value of its unintended artifacts: knowledge of the wider world and increased political sophistication, both of which were intellectual tools suitable to affirming or debunking Japanese colonial ideology. By artificially limiting the number of educated persons, the Japanese unintentionally enhanced the perceived charisma and authority of persons who elected to use their newly educated minds in the service of Korean nationalism and anti- Japanese resistance.

Like the Japanese colonizers, the Korean colonized were ambivalent toward colonial education. They were fascinated by new knowledge generally and by knowledge of housing, agriculture, hygiene, and health in particular. Furthermore, they understood the need for knowledge in resisting the colonial power. However, the decision to receive a colonial education meant acknowledging colonial rule, a typical example of contradiction between accommodation and resistance.

The goals of technical education and raising loyal “servants for the emperor” in colonial Korea were persistently pursued despite several changes in the Educational Edict and Laws.²⁸ But the educational opportunities given to the Korean people were severely limited both in number and in content. In 1939, only 2 per 1,000 of the Korean population were enrolled in primary school, while the enrollment figure in Japan was three times as high; in high schools, 14 times; in universities, 111 times.²⁹ According to Gregory Henderson, a specialist on Korea, “In thirty-one years the number of students at all levels increased over sixteen times, from 110,800 in 1910 to 1,776,078 in 1941. Over 50% of Korean children were not receiving compulsory education. Only 5% of Korean children went beyond the primary education. At liberation little over 20% of Koreans had received any formal schooling, as opposed to three quarters of the Japanese population of colonial Korea; some ten times the proportion of resident Japanese as of Koreans had secondary education.”³⁰ In addition, the geographic distribution of high schools is significant. As table 1 shows, only one or two high schools were established in each province. Limited educational opportunities in non-vocational high school can also be seen in the regional distribution of high schools.³¹

Over time, the attitudes of Koreans toward colonial education shifted from an initial general denial and resistance to gradual acceptance. In the early 1910s, when public primary schools were opened, the authorities had a hard time recruiting students because Korean parents refused to send their children to the new schools, partly from lack of understanding but mainly because of their resistance to Japanese rule.³² This phenomenon was especially widespread among upper-class Koreans, who still insisted on the curriculum taught in traditional schools, such as national history and language; most students thus came from the middle or lower classes.³³ Thus, public primary schools were called the “schools of the poor.”

TABLE 1. High schools (not vocational) in Korea, 1937

Source: Chōsen Sōtokufu, Gakumukyoku, Chōsen shogakkō ichiran.

The situation shifted rapidly in the 1920s, however, when people began to show more interest in sending children to the new schools.³⁴ As the number of applicants increased, schools were able to begin selecting the students they wanted. This was a dramatic contrast to the previous decade when they had to make an effort to recruit students. There are three reasons for this change. First, at the end of the March First Independence Movement in 1919, most people began tilting toward the new ideology, which emphasized the need for self-strengthening to save the country (a compromise to full resistance). Second, because Korean society, regardless of Japanese colonial rule, was facing social turmoil with the decline of the old ruling class, the yangban order, people tried to reestablish their social identity through education. As Henderson aptly put it, “The hectic years of late Yi over, education came to be the only path for ambition, and all the schools were oversubscribed several times. For the young, forming one’s ambitions in terms of the Japanese world and one’s career within Chōsen became almost inevitable, even where resentment and hurt lasted.”³⁵ Third, Korean society had maintained a long tradition in which education equaled a shortcut to governmental positions, giving people a high level of motivation to acquire it.³⁶

High Schools and the Development of Resistance

Educational opportunities in colonial Korea were especially limited beyond the primary school level. Remarkably, throughout the colonial period, no more than 3% of primary school graduates went on to high school. Even as late as 1942, the number of Korean middle school and high school students was about 25,000, which was less than 2% of primary school graduates. Of the 1,218,367 Korean primary school graduates (girls and boys), only 28,878 were allowed to attend high school.³⁷ The number of public and private high schools increased from five in 1910 to 45 in 1935 (girls’ schools included) and 142 in 1942 (including middle schools and Japanese schools).³⁸ High school graduates, especially public high school graduates, were nationally or regionally selected and well positioned to play important roles regardless of whether they received a college education. The importance of high school thus increased in Korea far beyond its corresponding value in Japan or China.

In this way schools, especially high schools, naturally evolved to become centers for the organization of Korean colonial society. This trend was strengthened by default, since on-campus associational organizations were difficult to establish under the strict Japanese regime and were often quickly suppressed once established. In addition, Korean high school students shared with their noncolonial peers all the customary traits of youth: a new awareness of the importance of social groups and the desire to participate in activities according to their own interests, undistracted by outside interests. The relative scarcity of university students, and particularly university graduates, meant that high school students were by default the most well-educated group in Korean society; they were among the privileged elite who learned “new knowledge,” such as math, science, history, and geography.

As a result, high school graduates thought most keenly about, and most often articulated, the colonial contradiction, and they came to internalize the colonial contradiction in an acute and personal manner.³⁹ Having accommodated the colonizers in participating in this education, they found that the same education was equipping them with the knowledge and organization necessary to resist both this educational system and the colonial system as a whole. High schools were a theater of conflicting values, strains, and double standards. It must also be said that the crude Japanese propaganda dispensed in the schools, and the oppressive and heavy-handed manner in which ideologically doctrinaire teachers inculcated it, was often an education in itself, and the lesson taken by its recipients was one entirely unintended by the Japanese.

Student Movements during the Colonial Period

Several scholars provide a detailed recounting of the anti-Japanese Korean student movements.⁴⁰ It is sufficient here to provide a brief survey of these movements as they relate to the institutional and social consequences of high school education in Korean colonial and postcolonial society. Both the patterns and the content of student resistance changed over time in response to the transforming colonial environment. This environment is empirically quantifiable as educational policy and patterns of police surveillance, organizational suppression, and arrests change, but on a more immediate level, the transformation came down to the level of individual students and teachers and the increasing tensions between them. A crucial artifact of external organizational and policy changes was a corresponding transformation of high school students’ sense of identity—what it actually meant to be a high school student. Increasingly, their identity began to formulate itself along the axis of resistance.

The March First Independence Movement was the first opportunity for students to demonstrate the significance of their political and social role. After that uprising, students played a leading role in nationwide political movements against Japanese rule in the June 10th Movement for independence incident in 1926 and the Kwangju student uprising in 1929. But as time went on, student movements became less centralized and began to be organized around local school groups. Before the March First Independence Movement, student organizations took the form of mutual friendship societies among students from various parts of the country who stayed in Seoul: for example, the North-West Student Friendship Society and the Honam (South-West) Student Organization.⁴¹ During the 1920s, communism and nationalism became two ideological pillars, though the two were not easily distinguishable. During the 1920s and early 1930s, however, organized groups and slogans made the communist influence more visible. As colonial control intensified from the late 1920s until the end of colonial rule in 1945, the student movement, regardless of ideological orientation, became narrowly focused on school and secret organizations. Open protests organized by nationwide organizations gradually gave way to local high school and secret organizations.

The most popular form of student protest in this period was the strike, in which high school students refused to attend school until their demands were heeded. About half of the strikes between 1921 and 1928 were staged by high school students. More important, high schools throughout the provinces of the country participated: Kyŏnggi (77 strikes); South Hamgyong (51); Hwanghae (42); South Kyŏngsang (38); Kangwŏn (29); North Chŏlla (29); South Chŏlla (28); North P’yŏngan (24); South Ch’ungch’ŏng (20); South P’yŏngan (20); North Ch’ungch’ŏng (17); North Hamkyung (15); and North Kyŏngsang (13).

Student demands embraced various issues: educational facilities, the rejection of teachers, school administration, and ideological and nationalistic issues. Among them, the rejection of teachers and ideological and nationalistic issues loomed largest. From 1921 to 1928, there were 434 instances of teacher rejection and 74 ideology-related strikes.⁴² Because most of the teachers were rejected for discriminating against Koreans or making derogatory remarks about Korean culture and Koreans personally, practically all strikes carried a strong anti-Japanese message. In the July 1927 strike, students of Hamhung Public High School issued the following statement to the school authorities demanding the removal of three Japanese teachers:

Not only these teachers, but the rest of the faculty are merely preaching the superiority of Japan and the inevitable disappearance of Korean people. We do not regard this as a true education which would satiate our zeal for knowledge. For those of us who are dependent upon our parents for school, our hope has turned to despair. Schools have become forts; teachers behave as if they were military police and secret agents and plant fear into our minds. We come to school every day with a feeling that we are falling into a hole. As Pestalocci showed, educators should educate students transcending national boundaries, based on a humanitarian spirit.⁴³

In addition, students were challenging parochial discrimination by way of universal principles, such as equality and human rights, which they had gained through colonial education, a clear contradiction of colonialism.

Student strikes continued throughout the 1930s. There were 107 strikes in 1930 and 102 in 1932, but as Japanese pressure and surveillance on students became more severe after the Manchurian invasion, the number began to decline, decreasing to 36 in 1935.⁴⁴ In the first half of the 1930s, students adopted the new strategy of establishing secret organizations, most of which, regardless of ideological orientation, were composed of high school students and graduates. It is likely that communist organizational skills, such as strict discipline, impersonalism, and secret contacts, were used by socialist and communist-oriented students in organizing secret organizations, but even nationalist-oriented students had to go underground because of heightened colonial control and surveillance of all organizations, communist or not, since the last half of the 1920s. Among 50 known secret organizations, 43 were organized around high schools. The same trend continued in the second half of the 1930s. Thirty-three out of 34 known secret organizations were organized by high schools all over the country.⁴⁵

One regional situation and one specific organization will illustrate how secret organizations were formed and operated. The regional example is of Kyŏngsangbuk-do (Northern Kyŏngsang Province), between 1928 and 1945. There were 11 cases of secret student organizations that were suppressed by the police; their members were later prosecuted and sentenced (see table 2). Five different local high schools were involved in the Taegu student secret organization. The case became known to the outside world in 1928, when the police arrested 105 students. The organization was started in 1927 as a secret lecture series that nine Taegu high school students attended. After three lectures, 15 members organized the Sinudongmaeng (New Friend Alliance); thereafter, the group kept changing its name to secure secrecy, first to Hyŏgudongmaeng (Revolutionary Friend Alliance) and again to Chŏgudongmaeng (Red Friend Alliance). Ideologically communist in orientation, this organization was dedicated to the anti-imperialistic struggle against Japan.⁴⁶ The local example was the arrest of twelve members of the so-called Sangnokhoe (Evergreen Group) of Chunchon High School in 1939. All were graduates of Chunchon High School, all but one were classmates, and all were from either the same city or province. The main charge against them was organizing a secret organization and a reading group to promote nationalistic spirit through reading books and discussions. After four classmates agreed to start the organization, they recruited their junior students at the same high school. All were sentenced to jail terms from one and a half to two and a half years for violation of the Public Order Maintenance Law.⁴⁷

A regional analysis tells us that in most cases secret organizations were formed by a single high school but rarely by several schools jointly. In the case of the Sangnokhoe, it can be surmised that personal connections based on trust were the link rather than schools themselves. The data show that none of the secret organizations could last long under the watchful eye of the colonial police. Most organizations were small in scale, ranging between two and 40 members, so as to evade surveillance of the police, and most were started by classmates of the same year, again to secure trust. Thus, even though they were dealing with national and international issues, their regional backgrounds were narrow and uniform. When these groups were forced to limit membership to close schoolmates, they inevitably took on a local or regional focus—yet another aspect of the colonial paradox.

Placed in a wider perspective, the institutional significance becomes clearer. The colonial situation in Korea was an environment in which associational, publication, and speech activities were severely limited by various regulations, such as the Police Law, the Domestic Security Law, the Newspaper Law, the Publication Law, the temporary order for carrying subversive documents, the Assembly Order, and so on. Violations of the notoriously restrictive Domestic Security Law, which covered political activities, increased substantially.⁴⁸ Under such circumstances, modern associational groupings were rare, and it was difficult to find large-scale social units as sources of identity. As Henderson remarked, “Underneath the top level, the long history of Japanese surveillance with its war finale worked its own will on the form of those organizations outside governmental mobilization. The Japanese were superbly informed and had excellent distribution of information within their hierarchies. Korean groupings were in constant fear of infiltration and discovery. In self-defense, the small group, the friendship circle, the gang, sworn in brotherhood, became the social unit.”⁴⁹

High school ties cemented under colonial rule added special meaning to the fact that students shared these formative years in their lives. They also shared a sense of mission, aspirations, frustrations, and guilt about what they could or could not do about their colonial situation, regardless of whether they participated in the secret student movements. Furthermore, given the limited sources of identity foundation outside school, solidarity based on common school experiences and locality became a much stronger basis for trust and mutual help. In this regard, it is important to note that even local landlords tried to establish school networks to protect their own interests.⁵⁰

TABLE 2. Secret student organizations in Kyŏngsangbuk-do

Source: Kyŏngsang-buktosa P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe, Kyŏngsang-buktosa, 457.

The suppression of nationwide student organizations led to the gradual narrowing of the organizational and political space for anti-colonial resistance. The fact that general and universal issues had to be discussed in secret local organizations illustrates the important theoretical point of colonial disequilibrium: colonial control produced students with modern knowledge who had to rely socially on very restricted school and regional ties to express their views. This case also points out the dangers of monosectoral analysis because it illustrates dramatically how colonial modernity combined with the need for control can bring about one consequence in one sector and a different one in another. Within the concept of colonial space, Korean colonial education started as a part of CFS, then challenged CSUS, and finally ended up in CSS with the institutional legacy of social relations based on high school ties. The long-term implications of this transformational dynamic can only be understood in conjunction with the consequences of colonial control.

YANGBAN AND COLONIAL RULE

Both nationalistic and revisionist interpretations share the perception that Korean society underwent many changes as a consequence of the introduction of new institutions and policies under colonial rule. Important institutions and policies were the introduction of new administrative mechanisms such as the myŏn (the lowest unit of administration), the land survey, new agricultural cultivation techniques, the new school system, industrialization, and urbanization. Among them, the impacts of the land survey were the most far reaching: land with ambiguous or disputed ownership was transferred to state ownership, further impoverishing the peasants and creating more migrant workers. The nationalistic approach highlights the exploitation and destruction of traditional cultures, whereas the revisionists emphasize development. Conspicuously absent in both interpretations, however, is any characterization of what survived these changes after colonial rule. After all, Korean society remained predominantly rural in terms of economic and population structures at the end of colonial rule: in 1938, 85.5% of the Korean population lived in rural areas, and agriculture accounted for 46.4% of the economy.⁵¹ Those tenant farmers who could not be absorbed into industrial sectors remained in the rural villages.⁵² How are we to understand this vast portion of the population in social and institutional terms?

Many studies have focused on the economics of the landlord-tenant relationship as it affected this majority of the Korean population.⁵³ There is no denying that this relationship was important to the survival of tenant peasants. But although their suffering was from time to time expressed in the form of landlord-tenant disputes, for the most part peasants had to endure and abide by the larger institutional mechanisms that the landlords and the colonial power jointly created and maintained. Those mechanisms were reinforced by the traditional family system that the yangban landlords perpetuated. For this reason, both the changes in and continuity of the Korean family system cannot be understood adequately without considering the adjustments that the old ruling class, the yangban, made in the context of the village. At the same time, the colonial power’s strategy with regard to the traditional family system should be taken into account.

The yangban class had been disintegrating as a cohesive group since the late 19th century due to the limited land and the increased wealth of non-yangban class. Its decline manifested itself in a further “yangbanization” of society. For example, in the Taegu region at the end of the 17th century, yangban, commoners, and untouchables constituted 8.3%, 51.5%, and 40.6% of the population, respectively; in the middle of the 19th century, they were 65.5%, 32.8%, and 1.7%, respectively.⁵⁴ This drastic enlargement of a once-exclusive status effectively meant a “cheapening” of status value. Officially, the yangban system based on official positions and land ownership was abolished in the 1895 Kabo Reform, and colonial rule arrived in the midst of status confusion. With the weakening connection of the yangban to the land, middle-class people and the commercial class began to emerge as new landlords. Thus, the extent to which the old yangban survived as landlords is very important in understanding the continuity of yangban domination during colonial rule. One survey shows that during the colonial period, 73.8% of the large landlords came from the yangban class, demonstrating a high rate of successful adaptation to a new situation, whereas commoners and merchants constituted 17.1% and 7.3%, respectively.⁵⁵ But because many official titles were bought up at the end of the Yi dynasty, the non-yangban proportion could have been much higher than 25%.

Thus, Korean colonial society can be characterized as undergoing a confusing shift in that the yangban were politically meaningless (at the central level), surviving economically but undergoing shocks, yet socially still influential, as one Japanese source described: “With annexation, the old status differentiation was abolished, and the trend is gradual disappearance of class distinctions, but the yangban, who used to enjoy privileges and respect, are still respected, maintain influence, and are scattered around various places in the local areas.”⁵⁶ Because social categories and economic categories frequently did not match, the colonial authorities used both economic and social categories in approaching Korean colonial villages: landlords versus tenants, on the one hand, and yangban villages versus commoners and other types of villages, on the other.⁵⁷

The degree to which the concept of yangban ceased to function differed widely depending on the area. At new schools, for example, the concept was rapidly fading.⁵⁸ Many public high schools kept detailed records of their students’ status backgrounds until the 1930s; thereafter, economic criteria became more important. Following our concept of colonial space, it can be surmised that in CFS the disappearance was faster, while in CSUS and CSS it was quite slow. From the perspective of young students, for example, their world must have been confusing enough: at school they learned modern knowledge, and in the village, their identity was traditionally defined by which family they belonged to. The yangban landlords in the villages throughout Korea maintained this notion of the Korean family.

The phenomenon of yangban resilience is well documented by many Japanese sources. Most often cited is the extent and persistence of clan villages and extended families during the colonial period. One study pointed out that Korea, unlike China and Japan, was unique in the predominance of clan villages, which numbered 15,000 in 1940.⁵⁹ The extended family was an important component of these clan villages. Usually large, up to more than 20 members, the extended family was based on strict patriarchal power and blood ties; in 1930, the number of extended families was 4,747.⁶⁰ These clan villages and extended families underwent many changes as a consequence of economic changes and war mobilization during the 1930s and 1940s, but they did not disappear completely—not surprising considering the size of the rural population at the end of colonial rule.

These clan villages were under the strong influence of yangban landlords because they had been established by prominent yangban several centuries earlier. Clan villages were viewed as conducive to the colonial rule by the Japanese authorities. Although clan villages had negative aspects, such as exclusiveness, conservatism, and concealment of crimes, these demerits were outnumbered by their merits: unity based on clear leadership, progressive education, facilitation of agricultural policies, and kye (“rotating mutual help”).⁶¹ In short, “clan villages are excellent self-governing entities.”⁶² This reputation did not come without some effort from yangban landlords, who were actively involved in local political, administrative, and economic affairs. The yangban served on various advisory committees and associations related to schools, forestry, the Red Cross, fire stations, and farmers’ associations and were leading members of financial institutions and myŏn chiefs. They utilized their positions to strengthen their status in clan villages by promoting clan activities, such as clan assembly and the publication of books on clan genealogy.⁶³

The yangban contribution to clan organizations served several purposes. First, it protected yangban interests in that the trust they gained helped them to play an intermediary role between the colonial power and the villages, thereby enhancing their status in dealing with the colonial power for their own gain. Second, their activities took on a facade of preserving Korean tradition and a quasi-anti-Japanese outlook and also consolidated clan cohesiveness. And sometimes they performed social welfare functions that were not available outside clan villages. It is no wonder that one Japanese visitor in 1922 observed that “looking at the myŏn system, one cannot but feel that there is a clear confusion between Korean tradition and the new colonial system. Although I have not visited many places, it is impossible to deny that myŏn officials are members of the big extended families of the local areas. It is especially so in the southern part of the country. Changing local decentralization into clan-based decentralization is against the true spirit of the myŏn system.”⁶⁴

The yangban landlords’ adaptation strategies may not have been possible without the colonial authorities’ judicious calculations as to how to treat Korean traditional institutions. The colonial authorities chose landlords as their social base, and the overlapping of landlords and the yangban class meant that the colonial authorities already permitted the continuity of the tradition in the service of economic interests.⁶⁵ In fact, the colonial authorities were extremely cautious about changing Korean customs, being wary of possible reactions and resistance from conservative forces in Korea. Therefore, they decided to take a gradual approach that was particularly visible in the introduction of new civil codes. Thus, except when absolutely necessary, Korean customary laws were permitted to continue.⁶⁶ The core elements of the Korean family system prohibited the changing of family names, marriage between a couple with same family name, and the adoption of a child with a different family name from the adopter. Attempts were made to change these statutes in 1940, but no fundamental changes were made to the old system.⁶⁷

There is much evidence to support the notion that Japanese colonial authorities had decided to take advantage of the old system to maintain control. According to one contemporary Japanese account, the village Alliance for National Mobilization, ku (subunits of myŏn), and various gye organizations were based on village organizations that were frequently part of, or related to, clan organizations; in many cases, one person occupied multiple leadership positions in these organizations. In ku meetings, village elders and Confucian scholars were invited and seated ahead of officials.⁶⁸ Also, in the selection of village leaders for the New Guidance for Villages project, family background was the second most important criterion. Those with yangban family background were preferred.⁶⁹

FAMILISM IN COLONIAL KOREA

Average peasants other than the yangban landlords and those who went abroad or migrated to Manchuria had to survive mostly in the context of the extended family, and there are several reasons why they remained family centered under colonial rule. First, near-complete lack of alternatives meant that agriculture became much more labor intensive and thus demanded more family cooperation. The whole family, including children, had to work to survive: “In early spring poor peasant children had to plough, care for the cows, fertilize the crops, and feed the animals, all tasks forcing them to work so hard their bones did not grow straight. They could not go to school and had to spend their life illiterate.”⁷⁰ Second, social welfare was poorly developed under colonial rule. Unlike in Japan, until 1944 emergency aid in kind and supplementary support were made only to those in need who lacked a family; therefore, family members had to support one another.⁷¹ The customary range of support was extensive, reflecting the extended family system: parents, grandparents, spouse, sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, brothers and sisters, first uncles and aunts on the father’s side, nephews and nieces, cousins, second cousins, grandparents on the mother’s side, and wife’s parents, in that order.⁷²

Another reason for the reinforcement of the family system among peasants was education. It is well known that Korean families sacrificed whatever they had to educate sons (especially the eldest son). During the colonial period, families below middle peasant status had a difficult time supporting even primary school attendance, unable to pay even 1 won a month for education.⁷³ Thus, they were frequently in debt. The other side of the coin was the perception of success. If one family member was successful after finishing his education, the success was regarded as that of the whole family, and the successful person was obligated to support the family. One Korean author of the 1920s commented that if one received an education, he could make money, achieve power, and let his family’s name be known to the world: his family could enrich itself through his influence.⁷⁴

Thus, for the average poor Korean peasant, village life during colonial rule probably meant that politically he had to be silent, economically he had to suffer under tenancy, and socially he could not liberate himself from the village-wide clan order and close family obligations. While he might have heard or read about (if he received an education) the outside world, in reality he was confined to his narrow village boundaries, feeling a great gap between the cognitive world and the world that he actually experienced because his radius of travel was limited. As modern Korea historian Andrew Grajdanzev notes, “The per capita annual average number of trips in Korea in 1937 was 2.1; that in Japan was 25.1, twelve times as many. If only 69,000 workers commuted to work every day, 341 days a year, this would account for the 47 million trips made in a year. This clearly shows how little the life of Koreans is affected by the railways. It is interesting to note that the average fare paid by passengers in Korea was 78 sen as compared with 22 sen in Japan.”⁷⁵

The Japanese colonial authorities clearly decided to promote their economic interests by not disrupting the traditional authority structure and family relationships they encountered in Korea. In fact, they exploited the preexisting social structure. This strategy is in marked contrast to the serious discussions underway in Japan about how to redefine the status of the Japanese family in line with pursuing modernization tasks since the early Meiji. The main issue was to what extent modern Western elements could be incorporated and, conversely, how Japanese traditional bushi (samurai) family norms and systems should be retained. At the end of this long deliberation, the final decision was to retain the basic tenets of the Japanese household unit—namely, the ie—as the first and fundamental element of Japanese society.⁷⁶ Further discussions involved how to reflect these values in schools. The social and economic status of the family was constantly revised and redefined to cope with new tasks, such as the labor movement and ideological currents. In short, family issues in Japan were viewed as a part of broader sociopolitical issues in redefining Japanese tradition.⁷⁷ This discussion started in 1870, and after two decades of preparation, a new civil code was finally put in effect in 1890. In contrast, no such discussions took place in colonial Korea, largely because maintaining the old system was beneficial in securing Japanese economic interests and control. For the Korean people, maintaining family traditions was regarded as an act of passive resistance to the colonial authorities. So, there was neither a conscious effort to change the family system, as there had been in Japan, nor, thanks to the colonial situation, any spontaneous flow of economic change into family structure and functions, as there had been in England. In short, the Korean family system is a case of colonial non-change par excellence.

POSTCOLONIAL AND POSTWAR KOREAN SOCIETY

After colonial rule, the Korean War (1950–53), as with other wars, provided forced opportunities for mobility as people were separated from the comfort zone of their villages and towns to mingle with those from other regions. It was especially so with soldiers who were drafted into the military and war. Also, land reform undermined the economic foundations of the former yangban and landlord class. However, that did not mean that they did not exercise influence at local levels. Based on their superior educational backgrounds, they were able to make their presence strongly felt in local and national elections. They thus were able to incarnate “re-traditionalization” of the past practices of maintaining familism at the local level.⁷⁸ Economic and political situations did not allow clan organizations to maintain their past pattern of solidarity based on land ownership and political influence. After the Korean War, clan organizations were considerably weakened, but they did not lose control altogether. They were able to gather their own strength by taking advantage of new political opportunities such as local and national elections.

For average people, life after the Korean War was hard, even for daily survival. Many people were dislocated during the war, especially those who came from the North to the South. However, in an economy without much industrialization most Korean people resided in rural areas. Even when they had to migrate far from their home turf, they ended up either in other rural areas or in impoverished urban settings. Although it was similar in rural areas, people in urban settings were especially left without state protection and mostly lived as nuclear families on a daily basis, although their perception of the family still remained broader than just the nuclear family. Politically they were put into a situation in which they had to directly confront bare state power without any intervening organizations mediating between themselves and the state.

Socioeconomically, Koreans were helpless in the absence of outside support, further reinforcing a family orientation whereby the sense that the family is the last resort for survival was quite salient. Of course, in this new type of familism, the scope of the family considerably narrowed to one close to the nuclear family. Although villagers participated in clan-based ancestor worships throughout the year, for their day-to-day survival they were left to fend for themselves. As such, the conception of family was differentiating in that the looser sense of a clan system and the stronger solidarity among immediate family coexisted. In this context individuals’ identities were not strongly established. Rather, individuals lived with a strong sense of being a “family individual,” indicating a strong sense of collectivity. It is no wonder in this context that family was the strongest source of trust, as one survey result showed. For example, to the question “whom do you trust most?” 53.8% of the survey respondents said it was immediate family, and only 14.2% said it was a neighbor.⁷⁹

The nature of familism can be characterized as a result of passive adjustment to a new environment during and after the war. Many people experienced ideological division within the family as well as villages. Villagers had little choice but to trust family. Through this experience, the conception of family entailed a limited one, based on blood, which presumed mutual support for survival. In this sense, this sociocultural pattern of sociability can be understood as neofamilism. This new type of neofamilism took on a more negative quality in that rather than being based on community cooperation and moralities, it focused on securing the maintenance and protection of narrowly defined family interests.

However, Korean society in the run-up to the 1960s was not one based on fixed structure but rather one based on relationships. This is largely due to the colonial legacy of the blockage of social changes in one area from spilling over into other areas. For instance, due to the suppression of labor unions under colonial rule, economic changes did not significantly affect changes in labor and society in general. This aspect of colonial rule had a profound impact on the post-liberation Korean society. Liberation for Korean society meant liberation from the imposed colonial modern facade rather than internalized modernity, and with liberation Korean society released suppressed feelings against the colonial power, as expressed in spontaneous violent eruptions and group conflicts.

To be specific, about 80% of the population was engaged in agriculture in the 1950s. The land reform in 1952 brought about the shrinking economic and political influence of landlords and the yangban class, which in turn resulted in weakening of clan organization. However, as local election results indicated, the political influence of yangban and landlords did not completely disappear. Their social influence was quite considerable, to the extent that they were able to maintain social distance from underprivileged groups, such as former commoners and untouchables, through marriage among themselves. In the 1950s, marriages occurred mostly within the same village or adjacent ones, and thus mobility was limited. Economic activities were also limited to cooperation among relatives and family members.⁸⁰ Those who could not make a living in rural areas, those who were not inheritors, and northerners who came to the South flocked into Seoul. In consequence of the land reform and Korean War, the number of extended families (families with more than three generations living together) reduced from 30.4% in the entire population in 1930 to 11% in 1955. The number of households with fewer than 10 members increased to 88.7% from 67.3% in 1930. However, this change did not mean that the influence of the traditional family disappeared completely. Due to a weak social welfare system, strong educational aspirational hopes of parents for their children remained strong, based on familial ties. Nuclear families in urban areas and those migrants from rural areas still maintained ties with a base in their hometowns.⁸¹

Overall, until the 1950s Korea experienced a low level of economic differentiation, while politically and culturally Korean society remained largely unchanged. There did not exist a strong ruling class that could resist the strong state or exercise influence over it. Only groups based on school, regional, and blood ties contended for access to the state. Opportunities for economic and social mobility were quite limited, and most people lived in poverty. However, individuals’ high aspiration for social mobility—the achievement of which would depend on neofamilial connections—were dormant and ready to erupt given the opportunity.

Colonial social changes are closely related to colonial control, causing colonial disequilibrium in which the social implications of change in one area are not fully played out in others. The concept of colonial space emphasizes how problematic it is to apply fixed conventional sociological concepts and categories to the colonial situation. The inherent contradictions within the new Korean educational system introduced to facilitate colonial rule caused students to challenge the colonial authorities, and the coercive responses of the colonial authorities in turn brought about unexpected social solidarity among a narrow school-based elite. In addition, the Korean traditional clan structure and family system were used to promote the interests of the colonial authorities. These cases clearly show the unsatisfactory nature of monosectoral analysis; we need to think instead about how changes in one sector affect the interspatial priorities set by the colonial power. The cases also show how difficult it is to make predictions about social change under colonial rule.

This chapter’s analysis also leads to the following observations. First, from the perspective of traditional institutions, what is truly colonial is to deprive indigenous people of opportunities to invent traditions. Second, as such, the ways in which Korean traditional institutions were approached were inconsistent, uneven, and partial, as inventing tradition under the colonial rule was largely done for purpose of colonial control. What is truly colonial was that there was no systematic approach to reviewing and inventing traditional institutions and values. Consequently, results of efforts to invent traditional institutions varied from unintended consequence, transformation, confusion, and abolition.⁸² The colonial approach to Korean traditional institutions left consequential legacies in the postcolonial Korean society, including the failure to invent Korea’s own tradition by its own leading group, such as yangban; the confusion caused by the colonial power in which it was not easy to identify Korean traditional institutions and values; and the pervasive perception that undifferentiated sticking to traditions was regarded as a way to preserve Koreanness. Also, the breakdown of the yangban, as the leading group in Korean society prior to the colonization, entailed the absence of a coherent group that would lead the discussion of what constituted Korean traditions. Such postcolonial confusion was further aggravated by the premature importation of Western institutions and values because of Korea’s incorporation into the Western world upon liberation in 1945. Korea’s industrialization was implemented in the midst of such a complex historical background in which the top leader and Korean society had difficulty in identifying their traditions or tended to view traditions as something older, prior to colonial rule.⁸³

Last, and most relevant to this study, are the theoretical and practical implications for postcolonial Korean society. We need to know, for example, how the institutional legacies of the colonial era have interacted with Korean patterns of economic development. Korean politics is played out in the regional arena; ownership of the Korean chaebols is notoriously monopolized by families; and most elite behaviors are based, as in the colonial era, on high school ties. Furthermore, high school ties are intrinsically regional, and the importance of the locality-bound family has serious implications for regional identity, especially given the scarce sources of multiple identities. High school ties, strong familism, and regionalism were the main sources of social trust at the time of liberation and provided the social conditions for the state-led economic development of the 1960s. Korean society was anticipating the emergence of “neofamilism,” which developed during the economic development of the 1960s and 1970s from the interaction between the state and the social legacies of colonial rule. Thus, the social legacies of colonial rule led to path dependence in the course of postcolonial social and institutional development.⁸⁴ This is why we need to carefully trace the colonial sources of the present phenomenon of neofamilism and how they have interacted with Korean economic development rather than simply impose Western sociological categories on Korean society.