Japanese Colonialism in Korea

At the end of Japanese occupation in 1945, Korea emerged onto the world stage as one of Asia’s most industrialized nations. Her people surfaced all at once ecstatic, confused, on the way to prosperous times, clothed in rags, united as Koreans, and yet still divided into societal factions preceding and formed during Japanese occupation. In the decade following her liberation, Korea fought a civil war, leaving the newly once-again-autonomous nation divided on the 38th parallel. As the South grew into “The Miracle on the Han River”, her northern counterpart degenerated drastically into famine, poverty and a grim human rights crisis—all of which persists in the present-day. These two pictures of post-Japan Korea offer a disparity in indicating the effect of Japanese colonialism. Gathering from Hildi Kang’s Under the Black Umbrella, the Korean Park-Kyung Won-centric film The Blue Swallow, and sentiments expressed in the Korean Communist Party’s 1934 “Platform of Action of the Korean Communist Party”, evidence stands to support both the detriments and benefits of colonialism, but the term colonized cannot be compromised in the face of ambivalent results. The fact remains that even in the kindest depictions of Japanese colonialism, Korea was colonized—subdued, sheltered and suppressed for the sake of a people not her own.
More a defeated people than equalized subjects, many Koreans found themselves subject to targets of bigotry. Acts of prejudice ranged from petty forms of ill-social reception by the Japanese to larger scale instances of extrajudicial mistreatment. Kim Sobun, a housewife during the later years of Japanese occupation recounted the lower address of “madam”1 she received from a group of her Japanese friends-- a difference slight enough to blend into the everyday, but notably implicative of difference between Japanese and Korean social status (Kang). On a level involving legal authority, the case of Christian “martyrs” well illustrates the ability held by