Janus-Faced Colonial Policy: Making Sense of the Contradictions in Japanese Administrative Rhetoric and Practice in Korea

ABSTRACT:Studies on Japan's assimilation policies in Korea (1910–1945) frequently criticize the contradiction between the rhetoric of inclusiveness Japan used to describe its administration and the policy of discrimination it advanced in the colony. This paper argues this contradiction is characteristic of other administrations that the colonizers employed in territories contiguous with the colonial homeland, including the French in Algeria and the Germans in Alsace and Lorraine. It contrasts this peripheral expansion with the intensive assimilation efforts found in internal nation-building expansion, and the less intrusive external expansion where colonizers built social walls to separate colonizer from colonized. In Korea, evidence of this contradiction between rhetoric and practice appeared in various social, economic, and political areas. This paper emphasizes the contradiction found in the education system established by the government general, which offered Koreans elementary schooling of a lesser quality than that provided Japanese both in Japan and in Korea. Over the decades of colonial rule in Korea the Japanese proposed a number of reforms that promised to close the gap between colonizer and colonized education, and scheduled others that due to Japan's defeat in the Asian Pacific wars never materialized. Thus it remains an open question as to whether Japan's assimilation policies would have succeeded in closing the rhetoric-practice gap had the colonizers had more time. Japanese relations with other minority peoples, including Okinawans and Ainu, suggest that, while one factor, time alone might not have narrowed this gap to sufficiently assimilate Koreans, both those residing on the peninsula and in the colonial homeland.