Bruce Cumings
Japanese Colonialism in Korea: A Comparative Perspective

Bruce Cumings

Asia Pacific Research Center

October, 1997

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I prepared a talk for Stanford some months ago, when I was invited. I thought I would talk about a paper that will be published in a book of essays that I'm doing on East Asia, generally, and would come out in about a year. For those of you who don't know Korea intimately, and Korean history, one of the things that is remarkable about Korea is the way in which the colonial experience with Japan continues to play upon Korean minds and Korean history in this century. I began this particular paper with a first draft for a panel at the American Political Science Association, in response to another paper, by Atul Kohli of Princeton, in a journal called World Development. Professor Kohli had argued that however exploitative the Japanese might have been in Korea, they were nonetheless also developmental, and the combination of exploitation and development made Japanese imperialism different than other varieties of imperialism, for example the Dutch in Indonesia, who didn't really leave much at all for the post-colonial regime in Indonesia. This particular paper in World Development is now part of a debate. Stephan Haggard, David Kang, and Steven Moon have done a joint paper criticizing Professor Kohli for arguing that Korean development should be understood in terms of the full run of the twentieth century, not just in the last few decades, and through almost fifty years of Japanese colonialism.

What I want to do tonight is to agree with Professor Kohli in one respect and disagree with him in several others, and also disagree with Professor Haggard and his colleagues. What I want to agree with is that to understand Korea's success as an industrial power does require a longer frame of reference than to begin, as so many specialists do, in 1960, when Korea had a $100 per capita income, and then bring the story up to the present. When you look at things only from the 1960s forward, then you have to focus on a policy package that was developed at that time that led to export-led growth over the next twenty or thirty years. The argument is really that there was some sort of "big bang" around 1961, '62, '63, when Koreans finally got their prices right, and their plans right, and their won-dollar exchange rates right, and then all of a sudden they began exporting. I think that's too facile an explanation of South Korean development, and I do think we need a longer view. On the other hand, to argue that Japan developed Korea, without placing much more emphasis on the repression and exploitation and really deep violence that Japan did in Korea--not only in the course of the hell-bent-for-leather industrial program of the 1930s, but also just in terms of what they did to the Korean people en masse, is really to get things very wrong. So, what I did in the paper was to discuss Korea alongside Taiwan as another test case of Japanese imperialism, and then look at Vietnam as a test case, so to speak, of French imperialism.

The original panel for which I did this paper was called "Colonial Legacies" in the economic and political development of various countries, including African, Middle East, and East Asian countries. And I began by asking what is a colonial legacy and why is colonial history such a neuralgic point in East Asia even today. My definition of a colony is that it is one way of organizing territorial space in the modern world system; one that obliterated political sovereignty and oriented the colonial economy toward monopoly controls and monopoly profits, even if that was done differently by various imperial powers. I take a legacy to be something that appears to be a follow-on to the different historical experiences of colonialism. A legacy can be good, bad, or indifferent. The legacy of rich parents to their children might be seen as good; an alumni legacy to an entering freshman fraternity class bad; and a railroad running from Hanoi to Saigon neutral, good, or bad, depending on your point of view. As it happens, the comparative points of view of Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam are very different and offer much food for thought about nationalism and colonial resistance, development and modernity.

What I want to look at is not so much colonial legacies as the utility of those legacies in explaining the postwar growth of Taiwan, Korea, and even, in a curious way, Japan itself. And then to examine the virtual opposite in Vietnam, namely the thirty years of war and revolution that was the prime postcolonial legacy of the French after 1945. The nationalist point of view, well represented in Korea, is that there's no such thing as a good colonial legacy, and therefore the contribution of Japanese imperialism to growth was zero, really minus zero. Korean historiography, whether in the South or the North, sees anything good or useful deriving from Japanese imperialism as incidental to the ruthless pursuit of Japanese interests. Even if a railroad from Pusan to Sinuiju is useful, a railroad built by Koreans, for Koreans, would have been better. The rail system, for example, would not have connected Pusan in the southeast to Sinuiju in the northeast on a diagonal route leading into Manchuria, had it been built by Koreans. Furthermore, Koreans think, were it not for the Japanese, a native railway system would still have been built. And indeed, native railway systems had been built on a smaller scale before the Japanese colonized Korea. In other words, Koreans assume that Japan aborted their drive for modernity rather than merely distorting it, in the course of fifty years of colonial rule. Taiwanese, on the other hand, have tended to look upon their colonial experience with Japan in a different way, as a reasonably happy and efficacious interlude between ineffectual Qing dynasty rule and, at least in the initial period after the late 1940s, rapacious and exploitative Chinese Nationalist rule. Douglas Mendel, for example, a political scientist, in his book in 1970 (The Politics of Formosan Nationalism), found nostalgia for the Japanese era at every turn in Taiwan. Japan held Taiwan longer than any of its other colonies, from 1895 to 1945, so the question is, did Japan do something here that it did not do in Korea, or did it do the same thing with a very different outcome--a very different native response? The French took a long time to colonize Vietnam, from 1856 to 1885, and then held onto it until 1945. There followed, as I said, a thirty-years' war. At the end of that war, in 1975, Vietnam was one of the most impoverished nations in the world. Meanwhile, South Korea, North Korea, and Taiwan, at least in the mid-1970s, were all success stories of economic development; according to the CIA's published information in the mid-1970s, per capita GNP in South and North Korea was about the same at that time, even if it diverged later on, and Taiwan was higher than both Koreas. Today, Vietnamese planners look to South Korea and Taiwan as models of export-led development.

So, did this different outcome have anything to do with the nature of French imperialism as contrasted with Japanese, or did the thirty-years war after 1945 bequeath a backward economy? Those are the questions I set out for myself in doing this paper. I want to argue that the differing colonial experiences of these three nations did make a big difference, if not the difference in their postwar development. It's a complex argument, however, and also a difficult one to make, because the argument is all in the nuances. I'll get to some of those nuances in a minute, but I don't want to be understood as saying that the Japanese ever did anything for Korea out of the goodness of their hearts. Whatever benefit might have come to Korea in the form of a railroad or something like that, it was always done from the standpoint of imperial interests. But, I do want to argue that Japanese imperialism in Taiwan and Korea was different from French imperialism in Vietnam. Taiwan and Korea got the same type of imperialism with very different results, and I think that's because both of them had different precolonial experiences.

I also want to make the point that Korea, as I argue in the paper, was a nation and a society with a long and continuous history, a well-recognized and understood history, within the same national boundaries. Taiwan was an island and a distant administrative department of the old Qing dynasty, and was not a nation, but just part of a nation. And I think that made a great deal of difference in the different responses of the Koreans and the Taiwanese to Japanese rule.

The Modern and the Colonial

Now, if we think about the modern and the colonial, what is modern in colonialism and what isn't? And where do Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea sit on certain scales of modernity at the onset of imperialism around the turn of the century, or a little bit before? Vietnam was purely agrarian. Taiwan had a mini spurt of development in 1885Ð91, followed by a four-year lapse, and then, of course, in 1895, absorption by Japan. Korea, however, had begun to modernize on the usual indexes in the 1880s, with mixed results by 1905, when Japan began its protectorate, but certainly with more progress than was to be found in Taiwan or Vietnam. Just to give you one example of this, I happened to find a few years ago in the library a book by an American named Angus Hamilton, who visited Korea in 1904. Korea, to him, was a land of exceptional beauty, and Seoul, a city much superior to Beijing. And I'm quoting him now, "The streets of Seoul are magnificent, spacious, clean, admirably made and well-drained. The narrow, dirty lanes have been widened, gutters have been covered, roadways broadened. Seoul is within measurable distance of becoming the highest, most interesting, and cleanest city in the East." (Foreigners were always concerned about cleanliness in their various travels at the turn of the century.) There was, for Angus Hamilton, no question of the superiority of Korean living conditions, both urban and rural, to those of China, if not Japan. "Seoul," he wrote, "was the first city in East Asia to have electricity, trolley cars, water, telephone, and telegraph systems all at the same time." Most of these systems were installed and run by Americans. The Seoul Electric Light Company, the Seoul Electric Trolley Company, the Seoul Fresh Spring Water Company, were all American firms. At the turn of the century Korean imports from the U.S. included Standard Oil Company kerosene, Richmond Gem cigarettes, California fruit and wine, Eagle Brand milk, Armour canned meats, Crosse and Blackwell canned foods, and so on. Hamilton concluded that the period since the opening of the country in the 1870s had afforded Koreans countless opportunities to select for themselves such institutions as may be calculated to promote their own welfare. This is powerful evidence supporting the Korean claim that their route to modernity was not facilitated by Japan, but derailed and hijacked. Still, note the indexes that the American Hamilton chooses to highlight: electricity, telephones, trolleys, schools, consumption of American exports, and cleanliness. If we find that Japan brought similar facilities to Seoul and Taipei, do we place them on the ledger of colonialism or modernization? The Korean answer is colonialism; the Japanese and Taiwanese answer is modernization.

Timothy Mitchell, in a book on British imperialism in Egypt, has a better answer to this question. Mitchell, in his book, wants to "address the place of colonialism in the critique of modernity. Colonizing refers not simply to the establishing of a European presence, but also to the spread of a political order that inscribes in the social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and new means of manufacturing the experience of the real." Professor Mitchell examines British colonialism in Egypt as a matter of "restrictive exterior power giving way to the internal productive power demanded by modernity." This is a discipline that produces the organized power of armies, schools, and factories, and above all the modern individual himself or herself, "constructed as an isolated, disciplined, receptive and industrious political subject." There's much more to be said here, but if we put things this way, then Japanese rule in Taiwan and Korea looks rather different.

The national discourses of Taiwan and Korea in regard to Japanese imperialism cannot tell us what's wrong with the precise timing of the factory punch-clock, or the railway timetable, or the policeman's neighborhood beat. They just differ over the auspices of their introduction to Taiwan or Korea, and their effects on national sovereignty. Every political entity that I've just mentioned, Taiwan and Korea, but above all Japan, put its citizens through a regimen of public education and discipline that seemed perfectly designed to develop the industrious political subject, with the vices of self-surveillance and repression that Mitchell analyzed for British Egypt.

Now, when we turn to Vietnam, we find nothing good to enter on either the imperial or the modernization ledger. The literature of anti-colonialism (the literature of colonialism is a literature of anti-colonialism) is written by Vietnamese who shout themselves hoarse over French exploitation. The French literature almost always takes to task the French colonization project (that is, it is an anti-colonial literature, too), and the industrious political subject never appears. French education was more likely to create the industrious political rebel, otherwise known as people like Ho Chi Minh. The French were not late-coming colonizers in Indochina, tying the colonies to a regional industrialization effort as the Japanese did; somewhat like the Portuguese in Africa, or other colonizers, they preferred to spend comparatively little money--just enough to keep the colonial settlers happy, the rice, rubber, and tin flowing, and the natives pacified.

When we make this comparison with the French in Indochina, I think we see the undeniable legacy and the irony of Japanese colonialism. They were imperialists. They were modernizers. They were every bit as interested as a Frederick Taylor in laying an industrial grid and disciplining, training, and surveilling the workforce. Above all, I think it's fair to say that the Japanese imposed the same modern project on themselves, during and after the 1880s, late in world time, with all the attendant uprootings, distortions, self-disciplines and self-negations, fractured outcomes, and moth-toward-a-flame terrors that marked modern Japanese history, and still play upon the Japanese national psyche.

Korea

Korea was Japan's most important colony, and also its most recalcitrant colony. Among Koreans, North and South, the mere mention of the idea that Japan somehow modernized Korea calls forth indignant denials, raw emotions, and the imminent sense of mayhem having just been, or just about to be, committed. For the foreigner, I know from my own work, even the most extensive cataloguing of Japanese atrocities will pale beside the bare mention of anything positive and lasting that might have emerged from the colonial period. This critical difference between Korea and Taiwan, as I said, begins really with Korea's millennium-long history of continuous and independent existence on its territory.

During the colonial period, however, Korea evinced a pattern that we see around the globe in the twentieth century, which is one of development and underdevelopment going hand in hand. As I've written before, primarily in my first book in 1981, it's that combination of distension and expansion of certain elements of Korean social classes, like the working class, for example, and the suppression of others, like an entrepreneurial or business class, that is the key in my view to the resulting postwar turmoil and civil strife in the 1940s. Within five years of the Japanese departure, Japan's imperial effort had left the Taiwanese complaining about Chinese Nationalist carpetbaggers, South Koreans with gnawing hate and respect feelings toward Japan, and a state organized totally as an anti-Japanese entity called North Korea.

Is it possible to find anything in the colonial period that contributed to postwar Korean growth? Clearly, even if you have a railway network that runs diagonally from Pusan to Sinuiju, it's better than having none at all. And in both North and South Korea, the hard facilities that the Japanese built that are so difficult to build in the absence of having them in the first place made an unquestionable contribution to postwar Korean development both in North and South. The heavy industry that the Japanese located in North Korea for their own reasons, connected to their penetration of the mainland, became the industrial base for North Korea's early heavy industrialization effort. It's not widely realized that South Korea had about half of the industry that the Japanese had built in Korea. It tended to be the light industries like textiles, but, of course, textiles were the leading sector of postwar South Korean development. It's also true, I believe, that Jung-En Woo (now Meredith Woo Cumings), in her 1991 book (Race to the Swift), analyzed a pattern of state bank and corporate, or zaibatsu, financing at preferential rates, as a means to shape industrial development and take advantage of product-cycle advantages in the world market. That pattern began in the 1930s in Korea under Japanese rule, and then became much more indelibly marked in South Korean development in the 1960s and '70s. The pattern of using state-mediated finance, central-bank-mediated finance, to create out of thin air not only the money, the basic capital for investment, but also the firms themselves, even the entrepreneurs themselves, is a peculiar quality of Japanese and South Korean development.

The evidence is unimpeachable about the industrial growth of Korea in the late '30s, before Pearl Harbor--perhaps before the Sino-Japanese War. Herman Lautensach is a person probably not known to too many of you, but he wrote a very fine geography of Korea, published in German. He toured Korea in the late 1930s, and mapped it. His book was translated into English a few years ago, so I was able to read it. What surprised me was that Lautensach, no apologist for colonialism, was still much impressed by the rapid development of Korea in the late 1930s. Here was an obvious, indeed astonishing, success, even if the development was oriented toward the needs of the empire. Combined with a succession of excellent harvests in 1936, 1937, and 1938, Lautensach wrote about a Korean boom "with the rapid development of all of Korea's economic capacity, and a certain amount of prosperity beginning to enter even the farmer's huts." The northeast corner of Korea, long backward, was according to Lautensach experiencing an upswing unlike any other part of Korea, mainly because of its incorporation into Manchurian trading networks. So there is scattered evidence of even a Korean mini-boom in the 1930s as Japan pushed a heavy industrialization program throughout its northeast Asian imperial sphere.

Nonetheless, at the same time, Koreans were the movable human capital for this industrialization plan--Koreans taken primarily out of southern Korea and put into Japanese factories and mines in Japan, into northern industry in Korea, and into Manchuria, by the hundreds of thousands and even millions. The most dramatic and disgusting element of this human mobilization, of course, were the so-called comfort women, sexual slaves, who were mobilized for the Japanese army during World War II. From Korea, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Korean women participated in this most degraded form of mobilization. But, what is sometimes lost in discussions of that particular episode is that Koreans, particularly people in common walks of life, peasants and workers, were mobilized all over the Japanese imperial sphere by the hundreds of thousands, yielding something like 11 percent of the entire Korean population being located outside of Korea by 1945. So it was an incredible human movement and also the most draconian and dictatorial part of the Japanese imperial era, from 1935 to 1945, when Koreans were forced to give up their names and to worship at Shinto shrines, and where intellectuals and political recalcitrants were put through intense torture and thought reform. The combination of the immense movement of Koreans in service to this war and this industrial effort, combined with this draconian repression, bequeathed to postwar Korea a very deep and completely understandable hatred of what Japan had done in Korea.

Taiwan

In the recent literature on the East Asian newly industrialized countries, much has been made of Taiwan's manifold differences from South Korea--a less intrusive state, more light industry, less heavy industry, a few big conglomerates, but many more small businesses and family enterprises. Plus, rather continuous export-led development rather than South Korea's pattern of import substitution, then export-led development, followed by more import substitution. Less nationalism, less hatred of the Japanese. But if this is true of the '60s and '70s, that being the period of the vaunted "take-off" in Taiwan, it's also been true since the 1920s or the 1930s. Gustav Ranis, for example, one of the leading interpreters and analysts of Taiwan's development, argued that the typically dispersed and rural, smaller character of Taiwan's industrialization effort was a key reason for its quick growth in the '60s. He gives a bunch of reasons for that, but he also points out that this was true throughout the colonial period. Much hoopla accompanied the opening of the Kaohsiung free export zone in 1966. Let me read you something about Kaohsiung during the colonial period. "In the late nineteenth century, Kaohsiung was little more than a sleepy fishing village. By the end of World War I, it had sprouted into the second busiest port in Taiwan, handling more than 40 percent of the island's import and export trade. As the city steadily grew into one of the foremost industrial centers of the island, it flourished as the site of refineries to process imported petroleum." If Taiwan was a fine example of export-led growth after 1960, it was in the colonial period as well. My argument in the paper is really that Taiwan has had a kind of export-led industrial growth throughout its industrial history, going back to the 1920s. If we look at exports as a percent of gross value of production, in 1922 exports were 45 percent of gross value of production; 1929, 46 percent; 1937, almost 50 percent. Hyman Kublin calls the increase in exports during the '20s and '30s literally astounding, but it quickly went higher in the late 1930s. Foodstuffs, particularly sugar, were the most important export of Taiwan in the 1930s. They also retained a dominating position in the 1960s and '70s. Another economist calls Taiwan's exporting in the '60s and '70s a return to normal, as Taiwan came back and reclaimed a place that it had had among exporters in the 1930s.

There are other contrasts between Taiwan and Korea that helped to explain its postwar difference from South Korea. I don't want to dwell on them, but the one that I discuss in the paper is the very different land situation. Taiwan did not have the increasing tenancy that South Korea had, with more and more land being concentrated in the hands of larger landlords, both Japanese and Korean. In Taiwan tenancy was lessened, and land and wealth distribution became more equal between 1931 and 1945 rather than less equal. I think this sort of evidence does demonstrate the leg up that Taiwan had as a result of its reasonably happy--I don't know if happy is the right word, but certainly a kind of imperialism that the Taiwanese people themselves did not resist in the way that the Korean people did.

What about nationalism and resistance to the Japanese in Taiwan? There was hardly any. The Japanese pacified the island within five months, meeting some resistance in the south, but almost none in the north. The primary recalcitrants thereafter were aborigines in the mountains, who remain recalcitrant today, not to colonialism, but to modernity. Even after the massive March 1st movement in Korea, and the equally massive May 4th movement in China in 1919, an observant American traveler noted that some Taiwanese wore Japanese clothes; however, "I can't recall ever having seen a Korean in getas and kimono." "There was a big independence question in Korea," he wrote, "but independence, if it is ever considered at all in Taiwan, is evidently regarded as hopeless, not even worth thinking about." Hyman Kublin, writing in the same period, said that Taiwan was practically devoid of any unrest at the time when Korea and China were full of unrest.

Anyway, quiescent and developing Taiwan nonetheless got the same ubiquitous national police system that Korea got, except that it was instituted in 1898. And here I want to make the point that no one, whether Atul Kohli or anyone else, should ever talk about this Japanese state as a developmental state, pure and simple. Chalmers Johnson popularized the view or the theory of the developmental state, but Professor Johnson never meant it to mean simply a state that tries to develop the economy. He saw it as a particular pattern of East Asian development growing out of models from continental Europe, emphasizing nationalism, national economy, the nation as the unit of struggle in the world system, in conditions of late industrialization. Be that as it may, when you look at the police networks, the administrative structures that the Japanese built in both Taiwan and Korea, you see a state that did succeed in penetrating and organizing people in an unprecedented fashion, compared to the previous regimes. But you also see something approximating totalitarian control during the colonial period. Here is how Patty Tsurumi described the police after Goto Shimpei, the paradigmatic Japanese colonizer, helped to develop the police system in Taiwan in the late 1890s. "Under Goto, the police became the backbone of regional administration. In addition to regular policing duties, the police supervised the collection of taxes, the enforcement of sanitary measures, works connected with salt, camphor, and opium monopolies, they superintended road and irrigation improvements, introduced new plant specimens to the farmers, and encouraged education and the development of local industries."

Taiwan's Chinese settlers, far from resisting, seemed to appreciate these reforms. Even Sun Yat-sen himself found it difficult to organize on the island. American travelers liked what they saw, too. And here I'm quoting a 1924 book: "Taihoku, otherwise known as Taibei, gives one a queer, almost an uncanny feeling after months in China. For here, all is orderliness in complete contrast to Chinese disorder on the other side of the channel. A Prussian exactness, which Prussia never matched. The Nipponese, it is quickly impressed upon such a visitor, hate any suggestion of irregularity as bitterly as the Chinese seem to love it." This ubiquitous policing structure in Taiwan was erected on top of the traditional Chinese system for local surveillance, the paojia system. Ten families formed a jia and ten jia formed a pao. At the end of 1938, for example, there were almost 54,000 jia heads, and 5,600-odd pao heads. The Japanese, of course, made this system much more efficient. Its functions were as extensive and total as the postwar Chinese Communist and North Korean Communist local danwei systems (local committees for control and surveillance). The paojia reported births and deaths; recorded and controlled all movements of persons in and out of its area, along with monitoring the conduct of the permanent residents; implemented Japanese health and sanitation regulations; mobilized labor; disseminated information about crop seeds and fertilizer; collected local taxes; and aided the police in every way. This was a Japanese fulfillment of the British project of omnipresent surveillance that the Anglo-Saxons never perfected in Egypt, but that Mitchell saw as their ultimate goal. It's important to understand that what American analysts in the early postwar period saw in Taiwan was a successful Japanese imperial project. Here I'm quoting Barclay's well-known 1954 book on Taiwan: "Taiwan developed into one of the most successful colonial programs in the world. The Japanese rationalized Taiwan's agriculture, established a strong and efficient government, the first the island had ever had, with a shrewd combination of political force and political guile, they imposed strict public order and penetrated every town and village with a structure of organized control." "This was a success," Barclay wrote, "that would satisfy most of the countries striving for modernization today." So, with Korea we get a general verdict of exploitation; and with Taiwan, a general verdict of modernization.

Vietnam

Now, a third of my paper deals with Vietnam, and I'm not going to go into it deeply tonight, except to say that there was a complete contrast in Indochina, in terms of what the French did as colonizers, compared to what the Japanese did in Taiwan and Korea. The French primarily encouraged extractive economic activity. The transportation and communications infrastructure developed accordingly, shaped by the export trade in rice, rubber, tin, and other commodities. Vietnam's extensive riverine landscape made canal building and dredging much more cost effective than the road and railway network that the Japanese built in Korea and Taiwan. Interestingly enough, when the French did build a road and railway network, they essentially engaged in running them in the same direction. That is, you had a sea route going up the east coast of Vietnam, but they also built a highway route up the east coast, and a railroad route. Why did they duplicate their efforts? Well, the French saw Vietnam as a way to penetrate Southern China. That's why they were in Vietnam in the first place, and that's why they developed a fairly irrational railroad and road network, to the extent that they developed them at all. When you look at the way the Japanese exercised imperative coordination from the top down through national police networks, you find nothing of the sort in Vietnam. The French left Vietnamese villages mostly self-sufficient and autonomous, unlike Japanese penetration of the villages. When there was rural disorder, the French relied on periodic punitive military campaigns instead of Japan's practice of continuous presence and surveillance.

Quite unlike Japanese policies in Taiwan, the French inhibited even the most meager forms of small business in Vietnam. Much of the middle-level commerce was in Chinese hands, rice mills and the like. And poor peasant interests, therefore, tended to be directed horizontally rather than vertically, given the general absence of prospects for upward mobility. Jeffrey Paige in his book Agrarian Revolution showed definitively that such a political economy has a tendency to promote peasant revolution. It's an important point, but perhaps one that bears no restatement to this audience, given that the Vietnamese themselves punctuated that point with thirty years of war, from 1945 to 1975.

East Asian Development

As I said at the beginning of my talk, in the past twenty or twenty-five years American developmental economists and political scientists have tended to explain East Asian industrial success as the outcome of successive "big bangs." A policy package comes along--Japan's Dodge Plan in 1949, Taiwan's policy packages in 1958Ð60, and Korea in 1961Ð63, focusing on comparative advantage, correct pricing, devalued currencies and the like, whereupon export-led miracles are launched. The general tendency is then to develop tables, starting with absurdly biased per capita income or exporting base figures (Japan in 1949, four years after World War II; South Korea in 1953, right after the Korean War; or Taiwan in 1952, after international and civil war--plus massive mainlander influx and carpetbagging from the mainland). Then you show the enormous geometric leaps propelled by each country having accepted the wisdom of neoclassical economic ideas, and thereby economists accomplish the miracle of empirically based self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, Simon Kuznets is a Nobel laureate and a major malefactor in this kind of work, but he's also more learned and subtle than many garden-variety developmental economists. I really don't want to quote this long extract from Kuznets that I have in my paper. But what he does in the middle of a highly technical article, where he proposes to test all sorts of propositions about Taiwan's economic success, is to pause and to note that "historical proximity also may have played a role." By this, he means the historical proximity of Japan to Taiwan and Korea, with spectacular economic growth from the early '50s to the early '70s. To my surprise, he goes on to argue for a kind of synergy between Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, all growing--if not at the same starting point, still growing together--and he thinks that this is something that requires more study. I would argue that the same thing was going on in the 1930s under imperial coordination, but I also think that when you look at the regional effort, it becomes very hard, then, to separate out Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan statistically from each other, because they were involved with each other, both in the 1930s and again in the 1960s. In other words, these statements about historical and geographic proximity would seem to render impossible the scientific separation out and measurement of statistics on individual economies and their growth. So, Kuznets can be read to say that regional synergy in Northeast Asia, late industrialization, and inherited institutions (he talks a lot about inherited practices in the region) drove the industrial growth of Taiwan and Korea from the 1930s to the present, thus making it unnecessary to isolate a particular turning point in the late '50s or early '60s when someone finally saw the light at the end of the export-led tunnel.

Conclusion

For those in the audience who are trying to figure out what exactly it is I'm saying about Japanese imperialism, let me reiterate some central points, just so there's no misunderstanding. I'm not making an argument that Japanese imperialism was developmental, or that it even developed Korea or Taiwan. I am making an argument that the French did almost nothing to develop in Vietnam. I'm arguing that repressive controls make a big difference in Japan's case. Various modern forms of coercion were instituted, starting in the late 1890s, as a way to control and discipline colonial populations, and thence to educate them for industrial, commercial, or bureaucratic enterprise. That was characteristic of both quiescent Taiwan and rebellious Korea. Secondly, in the course of imperial exploitation and repression, thought up in Tokyo and imposed on Taiwan and Korea, you nonetheless got a different kind of imperialism than you got in Vietnam under the French, Indonesia under the Dutch, or several different varieties of imperialism in Africa. That is, a system that simultaneously repressed, controlled, and disciplined the local populations, almost on a totalitarian model at least by the 1930s, and you also got a model of rapid industrial growth. Now, what sort of effect did this have in the 1960s when export-led growth began? I would argue that there's a legacy in South Korea of light industry in textiles; and a legacy in North Korea of heavy industry that makes it impossible to understand how well they did, if you don't go back to that period. I also would argue that even if it's hard to build a railroad when you don't have one, as I said earlier, it's also the case that it isn't the owners or the industrialists who build railways. People build railways. It isn't the owners of steel mills who make steel; steel workers make steel. It isn't the owners of textile mills who make textiles; it's people, workers who make textiles. And when you look at the growth of the Korean blue-collar working class in the 1930s and '40s, you see a fundamental process that was very telescoped and brutal in Korea, a process that is ordinarily much more long-lasting in other countries in the formation of a working class. But it was still Korean workers who built the mills, not Japanese workers or Japanese owners. And that is bound to leave a legacy for the postwar period. It means, for one thing, you have disciplined and trained industrial workers, particularly in North Korea.

Some of you may have read an editorial that I did in The Nation this week, where I argued that the labor unrest in Korea today can't be understood in terms of Kim Young Sam passing a bill at 6 a.m. on the day after Christmas. It has to be understood in terms of a Korean labor movement that began in the 1920s, not in the 1980s. In the 1920s the Korean labor movement first began, and fought a number of important strikes and labor actions against the Japanese in the late 1920s and early '30s--with most of the leaders ending up in jail. There then was an enormous labor mobilization under the American Occupation in the 1940s, again, with most of the leaders going to jail. So my argument is that Korean labor and its strength is also a clear legacy of this colonial period.

Above all, as I said earlier, it was the immense shifting of masses of population that makes Korea and the Korean attitude about Japanese imperialism so different from Taiwan. Millions of Koreans ended up in Japan, northern Korea, and Manchuria, in Japanese industries of various sorts. Anybody want to take a guess at how many Taiwanese there were in Japan in 1945? It's not a well-known figure, but the figure that I came up with is 35,000--compared to about 2.5 million Koreans. And what that means is that the Japanese just turned Korean society upside down, using Koreans as mobile human capital for their efforts, and that they left Taiwan relatively alone. Certainly to have 35,000 Taiwanese in Japan, hardly any in Korea, and very few in Manchuria makes a very important point on the reason why Taiwan and the Taiwanese may have looked back on the Japanese period at times with some degree of nostalgia. Perhaps this makes a more important point, as relevant today as it was in 1945, that Koreans have enormous grievances for very good reasons, growing out of the history of Japanese imperialism, and even though Korean industrialization can't be understood except in the long run of the twentieth century, it's also the case that they owe nothing, whatsoever, to Japan. The Japanese idea seems still to be that they developed not just Taiwan but also Korea, and the Koreans should be grateful for that. It's quite remarkable to see the difference in the way Japanese leaders will apologize to the Chinese for various crimes and never really, sincerely, reflect on what they did in Korea. It's not only unfortunate, but it plays upon contemporary politics. Germany has understood, it seems to me, it has reflected upon and educated its young people about the crimes of the Nazi era. But it seems to me that Japan hasn't even scratched the surface on the crimes of the imperial era. And when you know that, then you can understand things like South Korea, in recent years, diverting a certain part of its defense budget to prepare for defense against Japan rather than North Korea. That's a bit off my subject, but I did want to argue that when we talk about colonial legacies and colonial development, it's important to look at the whole problem in the round, in fullness, and to do it in a comparative way so that we can understand different outcomes in Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam.

I wanted to make one more point that I really think I haven't made, and then I'll close and take your questions. I said that for Chalmers Johnson and his ideas of the developmental state, that they really go back to continental European formulations. Friedrich List would be one person in that pedigree giving us the idea of a national economy, and of world-ranging struggle with nations as the unit of that struggle, in a race for industrialization. I think the central experience of Northeast Asia in this century has not been a realm of industrial independence where autonomy was the goal, or even the outcome, but an enmeshment in another web. Japan colonized its near reaches, in the context of a world economy led first by England and then by the United States. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, in the postwar period, industrialized mostly within an American web. North Korea and China defined themselves as outside this web, thereby endowing the web with overriding significance. They structured their states to resist enmeshment in the web, nonetheless endowing it with great significance. In the postwar period Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have thus been states strong for the struggle to industrialize, but weak because of their web of enmeshment. They're all semi-sovereign states, even today, with American bases on their territory in the case of Japan and South Korea, and with Taiwan still having some sort of surreptitious American security commitment that perhaps we only learned about last March, when President Clinton materialized a couple of aircraft carrier task forces in Taiwan waters. This security element, I think, is another completely unappreciated factor in South Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese development. But that's another story; it's a story also explaining, in part, post-1960s growth in these countries. I just wanted to point it out tonight rather than talk about it in any depth.

Questions and Answers

As I understood it, you basically saw as the key difference between colonial Korea and Taiwan that Korea had a separate national identity prior to the Japanese arrival and had its own indigenous efforts at industrialization, and they were therefore more rebellious. Is this the primary reason that accounts for later differences in Japanese power?

That's part of it. That's an argument that I think holds up through the 1920s at least. Korea had a long history with Japan, going back to the 1590s when wars were launched against Korean territory by Hideyoshi, followed by 250 years of mutual isolation and considerable enmity. The point I really wanted to make was that Korea is a nation with its own integrity. It was an independent country with a society and a history all its own, a universe all its own. Furthermore, Koreans have often felt themselves superior to Japan, or at least equal within the Chinese sphere, and to be colonized by Japan created something on the order of the problems between Germany and Poland, or England and Ireland--an intense relationship where it was very hard for Koreans to see anything that the Japanese had done for them, and very easy to understand all the things that the Japanese had taken away. That's part of the explanation for Korea's much more rebellious history, vis-ˆ-vis the Japanese, the stronger resistance at the inception, and the rebelliousness in 1919 and thereafter.

The reason I don't want to use that as a full explanation for the differences between Korea and Taiwan is that Korea was treated very differently within the imperial sphere. This is something that was much more obvious in the 1930s and '40s than before. That difference consisted in using masses of the Korean population for Japanese purposes around the imperial realm, especially industrial purposes. The stark difference between how many Koreans there were in Japan, Manchuria, and so on, as compared to the Taiwanese, expresses the deep disordering of Korean society that occurred in that period. I referred to development and underdevelopment at the beginning of my talk. Americans almost always think just of development. You know, you get your prices right or something, you take off, you start exporting, and there's just uniform progress. Everybody does better. I don't think that's the way capitalism works, I'm much more of a Schumpeterian in that respect. Joseph Schumpeter famously said that capitalism moves forth in waves of creation and destruction. And in the case of Korea, you had the destruction of long-standing, century-standing agrarian relations, and the creation of a new working class, often in the most exploitative conditions where people were worked to the bone and then thrown away. Still, Koreans for the first time are working in industrial circumstances, in factories. These changes happened in Taiwan in a much more controlled, limited way that did not deeply upset Taiwanese society, in the last, say, fifteen years of imperial rule. I don't know which I would say is more important: the first point about Korea having this long history as a separate nation, and Taiwan having no such history; or the effects of the last decade of Japanese rule. But I tend to think it's really the effects of the last decade, from 1935 to '45, that gave you a Taiwan nostalgic for the Japanese period; and Koreans who would really like to strangle the first Japanese they can get their hands on.

Two questions. One's fairly easy. What caused the population movement in Korea? And the second question is, Why are the Japanese not reflective about their behavior in Korea?

The first question is something I have an answer for, but it's a disputed answer. My answer is that the depression in the 1930s created a situation where in the most populous provinces of South Korea you had increased land concentration and a lot of people losing their land, losing rights to tenancy. I wrote that in my first book, and I was gratified to see a fine book appear in 1994, by Edwin Gragart, on the agrarian situation in colonial Korea, that essentially, in much greater detail, said the same thing. At any rate, increased tenancy created a surplus population that could then be moved into Japan for work in industry or in the mines, or attracted into northern industry where wages were higher, or mobilized to Manchuria. And I see no such situation in Taiwan. As I said, in Taiwan tenancy actually declined, the concentration of land declined. So the dovetailing of an agrarian crisis with population mobilization in Korea, and the absence of real agrarian crisis and the absence of mobilization in Taiwan, I think here would be the main difference.

Why are the Japanese less reflective on their history in Korea? It's a very good question, and I don't want to begin by saying that the Japanese have racist views of Koreans, but they do have a Korean minority in Japan that was created by this same prewar diaspora, a minority that has long been subjected to an apartheid-like condition, denial of civil rights and so on, an oppressed population somewhere between 600,000 to 700,000 strong. And having that be the largest minority in Japan, generally poor people from the start, well, in typical fashion the avenues of upward mobility are often only through criminal or marginal activities. So, for example, the pachinko parlors all over the country often turn out to be owned by Koreans in Japan. You get a situation in Japan similar to American ghettos, where people develop prejudices because they don't know what they're dealing with. And that is one reason that prejudices against Koreans remain alive in Japan, long after the end of the colonial period. But there's also something that I think is harder to describe, and more subtle, which is the intensity of Japanese and Korean relations, the coterminous and proximate nature of their initial modernization efforts. Japan, of course, was much more successful, but Korea was thinking along the same lines. It was beginning to try to find an autonomous path to become a modern nation in the 1880s. I think a lot of Koreans believe that because of a certain kind of Western imperial inattention to Japan as compared to China or Korea, Japan got off the mark quicker--got a leg up on Korea. In my view it is that head start that explains the difference between modern Japanese success and Korea's problems in the twentieth century. And it may be that in the twenty-first century, Koreans will finally make up that gap that the Japanese first began with after 1868. In any case, I think I'll just leave this question by saying that to understand Japanese-Korean relations, you need to understand similarly intense, conflictual, cheek-by-jowl situations elsewhere around the world: Ireland and England, Germany and Poland, maybe even Israel and Palestine--the Israeli-Arab conflict. That is how deep the conflict between Korea and Japan is.

One observation and two questions. The observation is that if you ever come back to this subject, I think it would be interesting to add the legacy of Manchuria in China's subsequent economic development. I know you have spent a great amount of time on that and I think it might reinforce some of your underlying arguments.

That, actually, is part of the book that I've been working on for some time, to look at what was in fact a well-integrated industrial grid running from Northern Korea into Manchuria, and then to look at how that skewed North Korean and Chinese industrial development after the war.

Now the question. In your analysis of the economic development trend of Taiwan and Korea, I wonder whether you could comment on two facets that you didn't touch on. First, commercialization of agriculture: Were there any differences between the two that you talked about? Landholding alone, that doesn't necessarily tell us about commercialization and its subsequent consequences. And then, second, the differences in the patterns of foreign trade. Aggregate trade, and the direction of trade. Because I would have thought that a key facet of Korea in this time period was its increasing contact with Manchuria. And then, one has to ask--what are the consequences for South and North?

To take the second part of the question first, there's no question that you have an integrated industrial operation beginning in Japan and moving through Korea and up into Manchuria after 1931, and up through World War II. When that is severed in three different chunks--Korea is divided into North and South, the Yalu River becomes a key separation between North Korea and initially, Nationalist China, and then later on, Communist China or northeast China, in the late 1940s. When that happens, it therefore makes impossible a statistical comparison between what happened under the Japanese and what happened thereafter. It's just impossible. You can only look at things like steel mills, railway systems, or port facilities, to argue that there was any benefit. And the truncation of the economy was so drastic that I know the North Koreans believe that they started from scratch. They will argue they started just from scratch, and that whatever facilities the Japanese left were merely incidental to their industrial growth thereafter. But that's still a big difference with Taiwan. Taiwan did have a problem of shifting leaderships, first the Japanese, then natives, and then the incoming Nationalists. But their economy and its trading patterns were not severed and sundered the way Korea's were. There are experts in the audience on the commercialization of agriculture in both Korea and Taiwan, like Mark Peattie, and I don't know if Ramon Myers is here, but I don't want to comment too much on that. I'll just give you one anecdote that I've always liked, and that is a Japanese agricultural official in the 1930s remarking that what can be done with incentives in Taiwan has to be done with coercion in Korea. And it seems to me, once again, to express just a critical difference both in the way the Japanese looked at Taiwan and Korea, and also the opportunities and incentives in Taiwan as opposed to Korea. The level of commercialization of agriculture, I just don't want to get into that.

Well, because in a way it is a big argument, isn't it?

If you look at the Kohli article in World Development and then particularly the subsequent forthcoming article by Haggard, Moon, and Kang, what you see is they go deeply into the differences between agrarian Korea and agrarian Taiwan, and try to make a big deal out of that. But to me, they miss the fundamental point, which is that Taiwan had a much smoother development. It was not disrupted in the way Korea was, by a whole bunch of things, but especially this enormous population movement in and out of Korea. Therefore, whatever growth may have occurred in Taiwan, and there was considerable agricultural growth, it's not nearly as important as understanding these population shifts from agrarian into industrial circumstances. That's not a real precise answer to your question, but I think I'll leave it there.

So do you think Japanese policy did make a big difference? What I want to argue is that the colonial policy the Japanese pursued did not make a great contribution to economic development. The reason I want to argue that is not because I'm a nationalistic Korean, but because I want to look at it in terms of rational knowledge. From that standpoint, we cannot accept your argument even if it is moderated.

My argument isn't just a moderate version of Professor Kohli's argument. It's a different argument. And what I want to refute is the idea that policy packages adopted, say, from '61 to '63 in Korea, that they made all the difference in Korea's growth--that this is where you must begin and in some ways end in understanding that first big phase of export-led development. Of course those policy packages were important, but if you don't understand the Korean effort in the previous hundred years, really, it's just utterly ahistorical and anachronistic to start only in the early '60s. The built-up stock, so to speak, in the form of railroads, ports, transportation, communications facilities, the way in which Seoul looked when I first went there in the late '60s with all kinds of colonial buildings--that when these complexes were put to Korean uses, as opposed to imperial exploitative uses, of course it helped Korean development, as compared to Vietnam. You look at Vietnam, they have one railroad running down from Hanoi through Hue to Saigon. To have a relatively well-developed rail network and road network in Korea is a boon to Korean development. It doesn't mean the Japanese did it because they liked Koreans, but you can't assume that if that weren't there, Korea would have developed as rapidly as it did.

I also think this idea, which is really a conception, that the state can create finance and capital for industrialization almost out of thin air--a Schumpeterian idea that Meredith Woo-Cumings analyzes in her book--this also is a pattern that was particularly appropriate for Korea and was learned by Korean administrators during the colonial period. I could, I'm sure, raise hackles in this audience just by saying this, but my view has been that the mass of Koreans, let's say 95 percent of Koreans in 1945, were thoroughly anti-Japanese. But the elite had important fissures, and one of them involved pro-Japanese collaborators, people who worked with the Japanese, people who worked with the Japanese perhaps because they thought that way they would help Koreans, who knows. But there were also elites who resisted the Japanese. This fissured elite is something that we need much more study of, but when you look at a book like Carter Eckert's on Kim Yon-su's textile company, you see that this was the first chaebol, the first big textile group, and they got going by collaboration with the Japanese, at a pretty deep level. That's, I think, an irrefutable case study. This book clearly shows that Korea did not start from scratch in the 1960s with its textile industry, the industry that was the first big motor of Korean growth. So, as I said, the nuances are the most important thing about this argument, and if someone comes out of this room thinking I'm an apologist for Japanese imperialism, what can I say? I don't want to be, and I don't think I am an apologist, and I think I've paid my dues in terms of describing in great detail the repressive and totalitarian nature of Japanese imperialism in Korea. But, I just can't believe that this all got going with a "big bang" in the early '60s.

I'm intrigued by the way you treat colonialism. It seems to me what you're doing is moving away from Chalmers Johnson. Because instead of looking at bureaucrats and industrial policy, you're using Tim Mitchell to argue for a critique of modernity itself, which questions both what the Japanese did in Korea and Taiwan, and Johnson's approach. So I guess the question is, do you still retain this idea, Mitchell's idea?

I'm gratified that you had that take on my talk, because I went over Mitchell's ideas fairly quickly, but in the paper itself, I develop them more. The idea--it's not necessarily Mitchell's idea--but when you look at the British trying to create modern industrial subjects in Egypt and you see how far they got, it wasn't very far. And then you look at what the Japanese did, with their administrative mechanisms, above all the national police networks in both Korea and Taiwan. Then you can do just what Mitchell says we ought to do, which is to look at colonial development as part of a critique of modernity, not just as a celebration of modernity.

I also try to argue that the Japanese have imposed those disciplines on themselves, in the modern era, and that those disciplines sit very uncomfortably on the Japanese soul. Even today, the question of what it means to be modern and Japanese at the same time is a vexing problem for almost every Japanese intellectual, as many of you know. And certainly, the question of what it means to be a Korean and to be modern, with the fractured history that Korea has had in the twentieth century, that is also a very vexing problem. We all, somehow, became industrious political subjects in the U.S., but it happened over a very long time, with Lockean liberal ideas, and various other kinds of ideas, getting embedded in our skulls, so that we get up in the morning and we go to work, we are good Lockean subjects. In the case of a place like Korea, a modern, punch-the-time-clock mentality had to be created almost overnight, and the Japanese did it in draconian fashion, but with relatively efficient, well-organized, highly penetrative mechanisms.

As for my argument about Johnson, I don't think he's really part of this debate. I don't think Chalmers Johnson has ever said that the Japanese developed Korea. His whole argument is about a developmental state in Japan, beginning in Manchuria in the 1930s, at least in terms of the administrative cadre that he talks about in one of the best chapters in that book. Furthermore, he doesn't think developmental states are just developmental, or create growth. He thinks they're nationalist entities. That's what he really thinks. So there's a connection between his first book on Peasant Nationalism in China and the MITI book in 1984. And that's what I think too, in somewhat different terms. It's really, I suppose, Eckert and Dennis McNamara and some others who have raised this issue of the Japanese being developmental, even in colonial Korea, who I am talking about. And that's the literature that I don't want to be identified with, even though I think Carter Eckert's book is fine, because I've never made this point in my own work, and yet Haggard and his collaborators are citing me as if I agree with Eckert.

Isn't it true that 80 to 90 percent of what the Japanese built was destroyed during the Korean War?

I've looked at the statistics on rolling stock, and railways, and various other things in South Korea. The fact is the American Air Force had control of the air in Korea within weeks of the opening of the war, and the only place they ever lost it, even temporarily, was in North Korea, not in South Korea. Thus the bombing in South Korea and the destruction of facilities was much, much less than North Korea. Your argument works perfectly for North Korea, which was cleaned like a slate by American bombing. But nonetheless, any engineer will tell you that if you have a rail bed that has been bombed, it's much easier to repair it than to build it from scratch, and all through the bombing that went on for three years in the North, the North Koreans kept the railways running.

If the Japanese left nothing, why is the colonial central government building only being torn down now, in the 1990s? Why is the Blue House, which the Japanese governor-general and successive South Korean presidents used for their presidential mansion, only being torn down now? Why is the Seoul railway station still standing? Why are all these colonial buildings there? I mean, I thought they were all destroyed in the Korean War, according to you. When I went to Seoul in 1967, it had many of the aspects of a Japanese city. Fortunately, I stayed there long enough to figure out that that wasn't the main point. But I think it's really quite a distortion to say that there was nothing left after the Korean War of what the Japanese built in the way of industrial facilities.

Going back to what you were discussing earlier about the industries in North Korea built by Japan, not with regard to the specific types of industry in North Korea, but specifically the firms that made their way into North Korea--to what extent was that the product of certain firms in Japan being squeezed out of the Japanese home market by competitors?

I think that was much more true of the so-called new zaibatsu groups, ones that tended to invest more in Manchuria in the 1930s, like the Ayukawa group. The great zaibatsu groups, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, firms like that, were heavily invested in North Korea. My sense, and this is more from a dissertation that a student of mine, Haruo Iguchi, did a few years ago than my own work, is that the new zaibatsu groups really found their frontier in Manchuria more than in Korea, although of course some of them were involved in Korea.

Wouldn't you say that there were really only two groups in postwar Korea, the collaborators and the resisters, that the Japanese allowed no political development whatsoever?

I agree with that. I wouldn't quite say there were only two groups in postwar Korea, but I do think that the Japanese allowed absolutely no political development. And in Taiwan, they did. Interestingly enough, there were local elections in Taiwan. There were fake local elections in Korea, but in Taiwan, there was some political autonomy and space for Taiwanese participation, and in Korea there was really none. One of the things that occupied my earlier work, what I constantly complained about, was the idea that Koreans were factionalized and that they were politically immature after 1945. The fact of the matter is that the Japanese squashed any independent Korean political initiative. So, it's a very good point, and it's a good point to level at those who sort of take a one-sided or developmental view of what went on in Korea during the colonial period.

You said that Korea was an independent country when Japan took over. During the takeover, what roles did the Western powers play? Did they recognize Korea as an independent country, or was it considered a territory that was undeveloped?

The Western powers have a pretty bad record in Korea, too, starting with at least the 1860s, if not earlier. All of them, by the early 1880s, had subjected Korea to unequal treaties, an unequal system much like that in China. Korea's custom service was penetrated in the way that China's custom service was, etc. Korea, in that sense, has a history much closer to China than to Japan. Japan was able to escape the unequal treaties imposed on it by the 1890s. Many of you know this history, but the fact is Japan was never threatened with colonization or with the realization of a colonial project the way China was, the colonial project that Korea actually got in 1910. So, that's a brief answer to your question, but in this book that I wrote called Korea's Place in the Sun I have a long chapter on the late nineteenth century rivalry over Korea, and I don't think you'll find that there was any particular country, Western, Japanese, or whatever, that ever cared much about Korea's independent existence as a country, including the United States. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Prize at the Portsmouth Conference, for "putting an end to the Russo-Japanese war," which also resulted in a protectorate for Korea. So, it's a sorry history, but I do want to make the point, and I make it in this book, that Korea was not some sort of underling of China for long periods of time. Korea was fundamentally an independent entity until the 1860s and the imperial era.

In 1945 and '46, I was assigned to the U.S. military government in Korea, to run the railways there, and I found out that whatever might have been built by the Japanese, there were lots of Koreans who were running them, who knew all the nuts and bolts. And I think that the Japanese did that for them, they trained a number of Koreans to run the railroads.

Many of you probably don't know this, but we have in Washington a captured archive that's very substantial from North Korea in the late 1940s. General MacArthur went to the Yalu River, and he didn't come back with much, but he came back with a large archive of North Korean materials. And in those materials, you have piles of documentation on how the North Koreans set up their industry, how they ran their railroads, how they did their police functions and all of that, and what you find is that by instantly coming out and forming themselves as an anti-Japanese state, they were able to use, not only Korean technicians and collaborators, but Japanese as well. A lot of Japanese technicians stayed on by force or habit in North Korea. In South Korea, the issue of collaboration was posed immediately, because the United States, quite stupidly, came in and continued the Japanese top-level officers in place for several weeks. And then they were forced to turn around and send all the Japanese home. In a context where all of a sudden the issue of collaboration had become a dominant one, that early difference between South and North Korea affected a lot of the subsequent development. But it's important to understand the point you made, I think, because it isn't just the railways, it's lots of other places. Koreans are a talented people, and in the context of a fifty-year imperial experience, lots of them saw the virtue of going to Japan to get an education. Much of the postwar South Korean elite got an education like that. It doesn't make them pro-Japanese. It doesn't mean the Japanese did it out of the goodness of their hearts. But it does mean there were people who were expert, whether running a railroad or doing various other things, at the end of the colonial period. I think maybe Koreans are moving into a phase in thinking about their own history where they're more willing to accept these facts. There's quite a bit of good work coming out from young historians, looking back at the colonial period. But it's also hard to do that when the Japanese themselves haven't really been very reflective about their imperial experience in Korea.

I read your article in The Nation about the recent labor unrest in South Korea. You linked it to labor history in the 1920s. Could you elaborate on that?

I wanted to make the point that Korean labor organizing has a long history. It didn't start recently. It started in the early 1920s with various laboring groups, socialist groups, emerging within this Japanese colony, and carrying off strikes and labor agitation of various kinds. Japan, particularly after it occupied Manchuria in 1931, reacted with draconian measures against any kind of labor organizing in the '30s. Tens of thousands of Koreans ended up in colonial prisons as a result of that. In 1945, they got out. I can't remember my own figures precisely, but it was something like 16,000 political prisoners in the South got out in 1945 when the Americans came in. And this gentleman may remember some of this, but the U.S. could not occupy the provinces of Korea very rapidly, and as a result for months there was a vacuum of power, and workers organized and got production going on their own in a variety of factories in the South. That was also met later on with a lot of repression and a lot of arrests, and the breaking of unions often on the grounds that they were Communist, when they weren't. But that was an important legacy.

And then when you ask what was the labor situation in the '70s and the '80s under the military dictatorship, it was one of organizing in the teeth of a very, very severe repression. One of the differences I've had with my friend Stephan Haggard over the years, he's frequently writing things like, ÔKorean labor is weak. This is one of the things that you need to understand about Korea, comparatively its labor is weak.' And every time I hear that, I knock it down, because it isn't true. It's sort of like saying that when someone gets their head bashed in and put in jail and tortured, they're weak. But Korean labor has been very strong, and these days, in democratic circumstances or where the president is elected democratically, and after major labor mobilization in 1987 and '88, you're seeing, I would argue, a very strong civil society in South Korea now, with laborers who know what their interests are and how to get them. It's true that these strikes are not doing a whole lot for Korea's comparative advantages in the world market; but it's also true that a lot of the problems of the Korean economy in the last twenty years have been blamed solely on labor. One of the reasons you have so much unrest right now, I think, is that if the government had gone ahead and deregulated itself, the bureaucracy got rid of a lot of red tape and various other problems, and if they had reined in the growth and influence of the big conglomerate groups, and gotten a new labor law--well, if they had done that, you wouldn't have had this unrest. But Kim Young Sam and his allies blamed all the problems on labor unions, rising labor costs, and have done very little at deregulating the Korean bureaucracy or reining in the chaebol groups. And the result is, in a relatively democratic situation, that large masses of people are in revolt about it. But it seems to me that Korea has one of the liveliest civil societies on the face of the earth right now, and it's a testimony to the long struggle both for labor rights and democratic rights in the country. This makes an important point for students in the audience, maybe also for adults, that democracy isn't something that is given to you from on high, but it's something you seize for yourself and that you have to protect and fight for pretty much every inch of the way when it's threatened. I know a lot of people are very upset about what's going on in Korea. I think it's wonderful. I think it's an example of South Korean democracy at work, and that Korea will be the better for it. And if their growth rates are hurt a little bit, that's too bad. It helps American labor when Korean labor gets better wages.

Why do Koreans get upset about legacies from the colonial period? This happened all over the world.

To answer a very long and complicated question quickly, a lot of the angst that Koreans feel about any discussion of a legacy from the colonial period would be amazing to an African living in Niger or Guinea or one of the other French colonies, because they're in effect still in the French bloc. They still have French administrators. They still get all kinds of help from France, and yet they've been independent, presumably, for twenty, thirty, forty years. Maybe the French example is closer to the Japanese/Korean situation in Algeria, which was such a struggle, as you all know. But, the idea that there would be some inheritance from a colonial period--that's not news anywhere else in the world, but it is in Korea.