This article introduces Shōichi Watanabe’s essay “Korea Was Not a ‘Colony’,” published in the special April issue of WiLL’s Rekishi Tsū, Countdown to the Disappearance of ‘Korea’ 202X, and presents the view that the Japan-Korea union should be understood not as “colonial rule” but as “annexation” or “union.”
The essay discusses the difference in meaning between annexation and colonization, descriptions in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and British sources, the treatment of the Yi royal house, public order and economic development on the Korean Peninsula, and the life of Park Chung-hee as an example of the impact of Japanese rule.
It is a text for reconsidering postwar historical narratives and for reflecting on issues surrounding annexation, colonialism, Taiwan under Japanese rule, Park Chung-hee, and historical memory.

2019-03-13
This can be called one striking example of the benefits Korea received through the Japan-Korea annexation.
There were countless examples of this kind.

The special April issue of WiLL Rekishi Tsū, now on sale, Countdown to the Disappearance of “Korea” 202X (980 yen), is a book that every Japanese citizen ought to read.
Why.
Because it is filled with the true history that, for some reason, was never made known and never reported to the many citizens who, after the war, merely subscribed to newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun and watched NHK.
The essay reproduced below is an important legacy left to us by my senior Shōichi Watanabe, the giant produced by Yamagata Prefecture who lived out his life as one of Japan’s treasures.

Korea Was Not a “Colony.”

The phrase “thirty-six years of colonial rule by imperial Japan” is no more than the Korean side’s assertion.
There are voices on the Japanese side that echo it.
But how does it look from a world-historical perspective.
There is a world of difference between “annexation” and “colony.”

Pizarro’s Invasion and the “Colony.”

In Meiji 43, or 1910, Japan and Korea were annexed.
There is a way of thinking that interprets this as Japan’s “colonization” of Korea, and indeed that has become the general trend.
Of course, South Korea and North Korea make that claim out of political interest.
So first of all, let us clearly recognize that so-called “Japan-Korea annexation” was the annexation of two empires, and that one did not colonize the other.
We must not forget that Korea became the “Korean Empire” thanks to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War.
That is where the story begins.
In other words, it was the annexation of one empire to another.

For example, in English-language documents, Japan-Korea annexation is expressed as “annexation.”
This gives a completely different image from “colonization,” which means making something into a colony.
In order to view history fairly and objectively, it is also important to know how words were used at the time.
We should not condemn the past by the standards of the present.
Even when we understand this in our heads, we tend to measure history with today’s yardstick.

So, at the risk of sounding somewhat pedantic, I would first like to explain as clearly as possible, on the basis of British dictionaries and the like, the difference between “annexation” and “colonization.”

Let us first consider the etymology of colonization.
The “colo” in “colonization” means “to cultivate” or “to dwell.”
The past participle of this Latin verb, “cultum,” means “cultivated.”
It also carries the sense of “refined,” and the English word “culture,” meaning cultivation and education, also comes from there.

The derivative “colonia” from “cultum” meant “farm” or “estate.”
Originally it referred to land inhabited by Roman citizens who moved into newly conquered territories with the expansion of the Roman Empire, particularly discharged soldiers called “veterans.”
They possessed Roman citizenship and also played the role of garrison troops in defending the empire.
It may be easiest to understand if one thinks of them as something like military settlers.

If we look at Britain, there were nine Roman coloniae on the island of Britain.
Among the best-known places were London, Bath, Chester, and Lincoln.
All of these were Roman coloniae at the time.

Now then, this word “colonia,” which in Roman times had meant “farm” or “estate,” eventually came to be used in the sense of the Greek “apoikia.”
The Greeks settled in Syracuse and the islands of Italy and built independent, self-governing “colonies.”
That was what “apoikia” meant, a place to live independently from the metropolis, the mother polis, but in Latin this too came to be called colonia.

So when did the word “colony” in modern English come to be used to mean a colony.

The first person to use the word “colony” in English was a sixteenth-century English translator named Richard Eden.
In his translation of a book describing the conduct of the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro, who destroyed the Inca Empire of Peru and shattered its civilization, he first used the word “colony.”
It appears in a book published in 1555 titled The Decades of the Newe Worlde, or West India.

Britain Sent Criminals to Its Colonies.

The modern word “colony,” that is, the word meaning a colony, entered English as a word evoking Pizarro’s outrageous invasion and plunder that drove the indigenous peoples of Peru to the point of extinction during the Age of Discovery.
The year 1555 was the year in which Mōri Motonari defeated Sue Harukata at the Battle of Itsukushima and laid the foundation for his control of the Chūgoku region.
It was five years before Oda Nobunaga defeated Imagawa Yoshimoto at Okehazama.

The verb “colonize,” meaning “to make a colony,” and the noun “colonization,” meaning “the act of making a colony,” were first used by Edmund Burke in 1770.
In his book The Thoughts on the Present Discontents, he used the phrase, “Our Growth by colonization and by conquest.”
Six years later, in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, one finds the usage “The discovery and colonization of America.”
It carries the nuance of forcibly taking land by driving off the Indians.
In Japan, this corresponds to the Tanuma era.

The British poet and writer Robert Southey, who in later life wrote The Life of Nelson and became Poet Laureate on the recommendation of Sir Walter Scott, was in his youth a man who dreamed of what is now forgotten as “pantisocracy,” which in Japanese would be something like “a society of equal rights for all.”
In Letters from England (1807), framed as letters written by a Spanish traveler named Don Manuel Álvarez Espriella, he wrote as follows.
“To colonize with criminals is one of the systems of England.”
In other words, he was criticizing Britain for sending criminals to its colonies.
He also said that the lives of Englishmen were exposed to extraordinary danger, especially in terms of industrial and commercial expansion.

From around this time, the English word “colonize” had an image of invasion and plunder, and all conscientious Englishmen used it in a bad sense.

Japan-Korea Annexation Was “Annexation.”

By the 1830s, in America, words such as “colonizationism,” meaning colonialism, and “colonizationist,” meaning a colonialist, also came into use.
These carried an entirely critical implication.

A word that had originally not had a bad meaning, “colonia,” gave rise during the Age of Discovery to the word “colonize,” as white people conquered the lands of peoples of color, and it came to carry the image of “plunder” and “invasion.”

As far as I know, that word “colonization” does not appear at all in British documents with regard to Japan-Korea annexation.
All of them write “annexation.”

The word “annexation” was used by the English philosopher Francis Bacon, in Union of England and Scotland, said to have been written before 1626, in the sense of equality, as in “to make from the lands of two nations or peoples one compounded annexation.”

In 1875, a jurist and historian named James Bryce wrote in The Holy Roman Empire as follows.
“France crossed the Alps by the annexation of Piedmont.”
Here too there is absolutely no implication of “plunder.”

The verb “annex” originally included the meaning of “without subordination,” and from the beginning there was no nuance that one side was above the other.

In History of England, published in 1846, originally a Latin work published even earlier, there is a description that “Julius Caesar annexed Britain to the Roman Empire.”
Even in that case, the nuance is strongly that Rome extended civilization to the island of Britain, not that it plundered it.

No Meaning of Plunder or Conquest.

Furthermore, the word “annexationist” means, in America, one who advocated the annexation of Texas.
Even in the phrase “the annexation of Texas,” realized by America in 1845, there is no meaning of “plunder” or “conquest.”

Bearing this in mind, let us look at the twelfth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1922.
In the eleventh edition of 1911, the year after Japan-Korea annexation, there was still no entry, but in the twelfth edition, published twelve years later, the matter of Japan-Korea annexation appears for the first time in the entry on “Korea.”

Britannica, whose first edition was published in Edinburgh in Great Britain in 1771, was, during the period when it was published only in Britain, highly trusted and read by intellectuals around the world, and along with The London Times was globally valued for the fairness of its information.
There one reads the following.

“On August 22, 1910, Korea became an integral part of the Japanese Empire.”

From the use of the phrase “integral part” here, one can also see that it was not regarded as a “colony.”

“The country resumed the name Chosen, which had been used some five hundred years earlier.
Since 1906, when Japan assumed control of foreign relations, orderly and systematic progress had been begun by Japan, and through this annexation that progress was made still more secure.”

It also states, however, that “there are those who criticize the suppression of Korean nationalism,” and the description continues in substance as follows.
“By reorganizing the police system and advancing internal administration, public order in remote districts where thieves and bands of robbers had run rampant also improved.
The tranquillity of Korea, since annexation, had continued without cloud, but in March 1919 a disturbance suddenly broke out.
This was the effect of the self-determination advocated by President Wilson of the United States, but it was immediately suppressed.
Japan had been proceeding cautiously with reforms, but seeing this, it came to hasten its plans.
Notably, not only military men but also civilians could now be appointed Governor-General of Korea, and the Governor-General, instead of being responsible only to the Emperor, came to be subject to the Prime Minister.”

The Benefits Park Chung-hee Received from Japan.

Prime Minister Hara Kei declared that he was pursuing policies to remove discrimination between Japanese and Koreans in education, industry, and the civil service, and in this way tranquility returned once more to Korea.
After that too, discontented elements occasionally made disturbances, but they were admirably kept under control.

It is not only during the period of Japanese rule that Koreans have caused riots.
Even after independence, there were many uprisings, such as the Jeju Island Incident of 1948 and the Gwangju Incident of 1980.
If anything, there were rather more than in the Japanese period.

Be that as it may, even in this 1922 edition of Britannica, the word used throughout is “annexation.”

Then, four years later, in the thirteenth edition published in 1926, an entry titled “Annexation of Korea” was established, and it states that “the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars were wars fought to prevent Korea from becoming a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan,” and writes in a very sympathetic tone toward Japan that “there was no way but for Japan to annex Korea in order to bring to an end the capricious and suicidal diplomacy of the Korean court, which in the end reached its climax in the assassination of Itō Hirobumi.”

It further describes in detail how, after union with Japan, the economy on the Korean Peninsula developed and stabilized.
The statement that “the government in Tokyo considered it Japan’s responsibility to govern Korea, and the Korean royal house came to receive high honor and generous financial support” refers to the careful manner in which Japan treated the Yi royal house of Korea.
It was given treatment equivalent to that of the Japanese imperial family, and Princess Masako of the Nashimoto-no-miya house married Crown Prince Yi Un.
If it had been the royal house of a “colony” conquered by invasion, such a marriage into the royal house of the home country would have been unthinkable.
There are no examples of a Korean king taking as wife the daughter of a Chinese imperial house.

In other words, through annexation, Japan came to have three kinds of upper class.
The imperial family, the princely houses including the Yi royal family, and the peerage.
Incidentally, among Korean yangban families that became kazoku peers, there were six marquises, seven counts, twenty-two viscounts, and forty-five barons.

Up to that time, the Korean Peninsula had been dominated by Qing China.
Because Korea was a country founded with the help of Ming China, when the Ming were overthrown by the Qing, Korea resisted out of a sense of loyalty, and as a result it was thoroughly crushed by the Qing.
Unless one hears from people who still retained memories of the era when Korea was a tributary state of the Qing, it is difficult to grasp how terrible it was.

By chance, I once had a former North Korean deserter live in my house for about a year.
He was an educated man who had graduated from the old Pyongyang Middle School, and according to him, the reason Korea at the end of the Qing was so filthy was that if people kept things clean, Qing soldiers would come, so they made things so filthy that even those soldiers would not approach.
If there was delicious food, all of it would be taken away, and so cuisine never developed, and all people had to eat was something like scorched rice.
Because they had long been afraid of Japanese pirates and could not go out to sea, dishes using sea fish did not develop either.

That is why, during the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars as well, the Korean populace was cooperative toward Japan.
As for annexation too, as Britannica recorded fairly, certainly there were opponents and terrorists, but the majority of the people were delighted.

If one reads the biography of Park Chung-hee, who served as President of South Korea for five terms from 1963 to 1979, one can understand how much Koreans were saved thanks to annexation.

Park Chung-hee was born as the seventh child in a family of extreme poverty.
Poor Korea before annexation with Japan was like North Korea today, and many people died of hunger in the spring famine.
So there was no way a seventh child could have been raised.
But thanks to annexation with Japan, he not only survived, he was also able to attend school because of Japanese educational policy.
Because he excelled in elementary school, a Japanese teacher recommended him to a normal school where tuition was exempted, and then he advanced to the Army Military Academy in Xinjing, Manchuria, graduating at the top of his class, and was then specially selected to enter the Imperial Japanese Army Academy.
He followed a course that would have been unthinkable had there been no union with Japan, and in the end, as President of South Korea, he brought to his homeland the economic growth known as the “Miracle on the Han River.”
This can be called one striking example of the benefits Korea received through the Japan-Korea annexation.
There were countless examples of this kind.
To be continued.