From Korea to Kyoto— Japanese Expansionism

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The early Meiji era (late Nineteenth century) also brought in a new era of continentalism to Japan, however, it was Europe (and Europeanized North America) that became the source of new knowledges, which were articulated against the freshly constructed (but supposedly ancient) features of a “timeless” cultural Japanese history. And this time, Japan was the first society in the area to realize the military effects of modern industrialization.

“These enterprises [the Japanese colonial programs in Korea] pushed the Korean farmer from landed farming into tenant farming. In 1935 86% of the Koreans in Osaka prefecture were laborers who had been farmers. (Mayu 1994)

By 1900, Japan’s increasing grasp of global geopolitics together with its growing industrial capacity made territorial expansion a credible prospect. The Korean peninsula again became the middle ground for its politically and militarily adventuresome neighbors. When Japan consolidated its “interests” in the Korean Peninsula with the 1910 annexation, this was simply the first of other expansionist moves. The US, which had recently occupied the Philippines, could hardly complain, and then WWI gave Japan both political breathing-time and an expanding world market for its industrial goods.

LOOK AGAIN: Japanese government films from the 1930s showed rural Manchuria as an agricultural bonanza to encourage Japanese emigration to this region. The creation of Shinto shrines also marked the extension of Japanese Imperial control over these new colonies. Of course this “new” land was expropriated from local landowners and tenant farmers.
(Source: NHK TV)

By the 1920s, Japan was moving into Manchuria, and its colonial sway over Korea had expanded from early “land reforms” that put much of Korean agriculture into Japanese hands, to more invasive cultural experiments (such as the use of Japanese in the schools), some of which were alibied by a liberal sentiment of an eventual “Greater Japan” in which Japanese and Koreans would share equal status. But the severity of police control, the lack of social and employment opportunity, and the continuing drain of resources (including food) from Korea, pushed many people into fleeing the Peninsula either to Manchuria, or to Japan. By 1938 there were about 800,000 Koreans in Japan.