Korean National Identity under Japanese Colonial Rule

Yi Gwangsu and the March First Movement of 1919

Michael Shin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781134830640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern Korean nationalism has been shaped by the turbulent historical forces that shook and transformed the peninsula during the twentieth century, including foreign occupation, civil war, and division. This book examines the emergence of the nation as the hegemonic form of collective identity after the March First Movement of 1919, widely seen as one of the major turning points of modern Korean history. The analysis focuses on Yi Gwangsu (1892–1950), a pioneering novelist, newspaper editor, and leader of the nationalist movement, who was directly involved in many aspects of its emergence during the Japanese occupation period. Yi Gwangsu was one of the few intellectuals who not only wrote for almost the entirety of the colonial period but who also was centrally involved in many institutions related to the production of identity. By focusing on Yi Gwangsu the book provides a different kind of historical narrative linking the various fragments of the nation, puts forward a new understanding of the March First Movement and its role in the emergence of the nation, and demonstrates how central to the emergence of the nation were the development of the print industry, the rise of a modern readership, and the emergence of a capitalist market for print. This book shows how the March First Movement catalyzed the confluence of these factors, enabling the nation to emerge as the dominant form of collective identity.

1 Pyeongan province¹

When Taejo [Yi Seonggye, the founder of Joseon] took over the kingship from the Wang family by military force, there were many valiant commanders from the northwest among the retainers who aided him. However, after he established his government, he ordered that people from the northwest not be appointed to high positions.

During the next 300 years, no one from Pyeongan or Hamgyeong province had a high post …

The sadaebu of Seoul did not associate with or marry people from the northwest. People from the northwest did not dare to think about associating with sadaebu from Seoul.

As a result, sadaebu ultimately disappeared from the two northwest provinces … The two northwestern provinces of Hamgyeong and Pyeongan are not fit [for people] to live.

Taengniji, Yi Junghwan (1751)²

On March 1, 1919, what would become a countrywide uprising initially appeared to be a regional movement. The only places outside of Seoul and Wonsan where major protests occurred were towns and cities located in the northwestern province of Pyeongan: Pyongyang, Jinnampo, Anju, Seoncheon, and Uiju. The province played an outsize role in the early days of the movement; as a police report noted, of the eighty-one places where protests erupted, fifty-eight were in Pyeongan.³ The prominent role of the province is not surprising; of the thirty-three signers of the Declaration of Independence, eleven were from Pyeongan, the most from any single province.⁴ Protests in the area peaked at the end of the first week of March, but there was another burst of activity at the end of the month and the beginning of April in North Pyeongan province.⁵ Though the movement in the province was suppressed relatively quickly, it played a critical role in spreading the uprising to other regions of the country.

New forms of politics became widespread earlier in Pyeongan, as it underwent social transformation faster than other regions of the country. Though it contained less than 20 percent of the total Joseon population, the province turned out a disproportionately high number of modern elites during the early twentieth century, including educators, political leaders, religious leaders, intellectuals, and artists.⁶ They formed one of the two major regional power groups, the other being from Jeolla province in the southwest. The rise of the province was the result of a number of factors. During the Joseon period (1392–1910), the province had been politically marginalized, few of its residents gaining high official posts in the capital. As the influence of Neo-Confucianism in the region grew relatively weaker, commerce, which was not valued highly in Confucianism, was as a result more developed. In the late nineteenth century, amidst the disruptions of imperialism, the northwest began to adopt Western ideas, particularly Protestant Christianity, much earlier and more rapidly than other regions of the country. The region also rapidly adopted and promoted Western-style education, producing modern individuals who became a new elite.

This chapter examines how the strength of merchant communities and the rapid adoption of Christianity and modern education combined to begin transforming this marginalized region into a civil society.⁷ The last part of this chapter discusses the emergence of the term “society” in discourse and of new forms of political action. Because of how few primary sources exist, not much research has been done on the province in the early modern period. O Suchang did a major study of Pyeongan society in the late Joseon period up to the eighteenth century;⁸ studies have also been published on the Hong Gyeongnae rebellion of 1811–1812, which took place in the province.⁹ Developments in the province in the mid-nineteenth century remain virtually unexamined,¹⁰ though there has been research on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in relation to the history of Christianity. Despite the lack of sources, enough exists to provide a general picture of what happened in the province at the turn of the century.

Yi Gwangsu was not directly rooted in these communities in Pyeongan: He was not from a merchant family, was not a Christian, and was not a graduate of one of the province’s modern schools. After he was orphaned, he left his hometown of Jeongju in 1905 to attend school in Seoul and later Tokyo. While in Japan, he attended the Christian school Meiji Gakuin but never became a believer, though he was an avid reader of Tolstoy and was profoundly influenced by both his literature and his ideas on society. Perhaps not surprising for someone who had a difficult childhood, Yi had no particular affection for his home province. In a panel discussion of writers from the northwest in 1940, Yi said that he had no interest in spending his remaining years there.¹¹ Nonetheless, Yi did maintain ties to Pyeongan. Throughout his career, his closest colleagues were intellectuals, writers, and activists from the province. If the province was one of the first regions where the social base emerged for a new ideology of nationalism, then Yi’s connections to it helped him to become one of its major ideologues.

Commerce

The northwest provinces occupied a unique place within the political economy of Joseon. Politically, the region was marginalized, with few people from the region able to rise to high government posts,¹² as those who passed the civil service examination faced discrimination in appointments to official positions. Agriculture in the region was relatively undeveloped since wet-field rice cultivation was not widely adopted. It is not surprising that Yi Junghwan considered the northwest to be unliveable.

In contrast to agriculture, however, commerce thrived as the region became a major commercial center during the late Joseon period. The rise of markets beginning in the seventeenth century enabled the emergence of a new class of private merchants that challenged the position of official merchants who had been granted monopolies over certain goods by the government.¹³ Conditions in the northwest were particularly favorable for commercial development. Gold and silver mines began to be established in the northwest in the seventeenth century, providing capital for commercial ventures in addition to tribute for China. Tribute missions to China, since they had traveled by an overland route, gave opportunities to merchants from the northwest who accompanied the tribute missions to engage in foreign trade and thus accumulate great sums of wealth.¹⁴ Many of the powerful private merchants who emerged in this period were from Pyeongan province. Taengniji noted that Pyongyang and Anju had the largest number of wealthy merchants after Seoul and Gaeseong. In Pyongyang, over forty kinds of stores became established, selling goods ranging from daily necessities to paper, cotton, silk, and metal goods and performing services such as dyeing.¹⁵ Some merchants were involved in commercial agriculture, selling products such as tobacco.¹⁶ Merchants in the province reached markets throughout the country and handled goods from both Qing China and Japan.

The growth of commerce stimulated the beginning of handicraft industries in Pyeongan province in the eighteenth century. As in other countries, they produced goods using resources that were nearby and plentiful. One of the early industries was brassware. As the use of metallic currency increased, some merchants involved in the bronze trade began to expand into making brassware. By the nineteenth century, artisan towns specializing in brassware emerged in regions such as Napcheongjeong in Jeongju, as well as in Gaeseong. Similar developments occurred in other towns of the province. Anju became the center of the ironware industry, and the silk industry thrived in Yeongbyeon and Seoncheon as well as Anju.¹⁷ These towns seem to have had concentrations of relatively large-scale household industries where itinerant merchants (bobusang) picked up their wares and brought them to the periodic markets. Opportunities for growth and expansion continued past the middle of the century as a simple factory system developed based on specialization and division of labor.¹⁸

Commercial development led to urbanization. Pyongyang became the second largest city in the country; by the end of the eighteenth century, it had a population of slightly over 100,000. By comparison, the population of Seoul was 189,000, and the population of Jeonju in Jeolla province was 72,500 in the same period.¹⁹ Pyeongan province as a whole was also more urbanized than other regions of the country. It had the largest number of towns with a population over 5,000, a total of 13.²⁰ Of cities and towns with a population greater than 2,500, Pyeongan province contained 31 out of 137 towns, exceeding the provinces of Gyeongsang (30 towns) and Jeolla (20).²¹ Even small towns in Pyeongan province were active as commercial centers.²²

In short, what emerged in Pyeongan province in the late Joseon period was a social order that was different from that of the more strongly Neo-Confucian central and southern regions of the country. In a book published in 1929, the educator Baek Nakjun, who, like Yi Gwangsu, was from Jeongju in north Pyeongan province, summarized the characteristics of the province:

The people in northern Korea are more aggressive and energetic than those of the south. They have been hard workers, fighting against the mountainous environment in which they till the ground. Not many of the northerners held high offices in the government, but were rather subject to the oppression and extortion of the officials sent from Seoul. Thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the March First Movement
• 1 Pyeongan province
• 2 Print capitalism
• 3 Modern literature
• 4 The Cultural Policy
• 5 Reconstruction and culturalism
• 6 National literature and melodrama
• Conclusion: the June Tenth Movement
• Bibliography
• Index