Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945

From the late nineteenth century, Japan sought to incorporate the Korean Peninsula into its expanding empire. Japan took control of Korea in 1910 and ruled it until the end of World War II. During this colonial period, Japan advertised as a national goal the assimilation of Koreans into the Japanese state. It never achieved that goal. Mark Caprio here examines why Japan's assimilation efforts failed. Utilizing government documents, personal travel accounts, diaries, newspapers, and works of fiction, he uncovers plenty of evidence for the potential for assimilation but very few practical initiatives to implement the policy. Japan's early history of colonial rule included tactics used with peoples such as the Ainu and Ryukyuan that tended more toward obliterating those cultures than to incorporating the people as equal Japanese citizens. Following the annexation of Taiwan in 1895, Japanese policymakers turned to European imperialist models, especially those of France and England, in developing strengthening its plan for assimilation policies. But, although Japanese used rhetoric that embraced assimilation, Japanese people themselves, from the top levels of government down, considered Koreans inferior and gave them few political rights. Segregation was built into everyday life. Japanese maintained separate communities in Korea, children were schooled in two separate and unequal systems, there was relatively limited intermarriage, and prejudice was ingrained. Under these circumstances, many Koreans resisted assimilation. By not actively promoting Korean-Japanese integration on the ground, Japan's rhetoric of assimilation remained just that. Mark E. Caprio is a professor in the Department of Intercultural Communications, Rikkyo University, Tokyo. "There is no other publication in the English language that comes close to what Mark Caprio has achieved. His book will become required reading for anyone who wants to learn about Korea's experience under Japanese colonialism." - James Palais, University of Washington "The most original aspect of this study is the author's effort to place the Japanese policy of assimilation in a broad comparative context. What becomes abundantly clear from this comparison is that assimilation rarely works at all, and even when pursued with some vigor by a colonial regime at first it is eventually abandoned or profoundly altered....The book also presents many new materials - debates in the press, the views of prominent intellectual and political figures, policy documents-that will be of great interest, and often great fascination, to students of modern Japanese and Korean history." - Peter Duus, emeritus professor, Stanford University "An exceedingly well-researched and insightful work on an important topic. It will make a strong contribution to the field of Korean studies and, because of its comparative scope, will also be important to historians and students of modern Japan." - Michael Robinson, Indiana University