Chatani 2016

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2016;58(4):1004–1031.
0010-4175/16 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016
doi:10.1017/S0010417516000517
The Ruralist Paradigm: Social Work

Bureaucrats in Colonial Korea and
Japan’s Assimilationism in the Interwar
Period
S AYAK A C HATAN I
FASS Postdoctoral Fellow, National University of Singapore
When historians comparing modern empires examine the Japanese Empire’s

colonial rule, one of the biggest puzzles is its adamant adherence to the princi-
ple of assimilationism. Even in the 1920s, when almost all the Western empires,
including France’s, denounced the model as costly and inhumane, the Japanese
raised the banner of assimilationism—or the policy of “extending the main-
land”—and implemented new measures to both integrate and differentiate col-
onized populations. Many elements contributed to Japan’s interwar fixation on
assimilationist rhetoric. One was the emphasis in Japanese political discourse
on the ethnic “sameness” between the Japanese and colonial populations.1
For instance, after the mass independence demonstrations in the 1919 March
First Movement, or Korea’s “Wilsonian Moment,” Prime Minister Hara
Takashi argued, “The desire of most Koreans is not for independence, but to
be treated as equals of the Japanese. I intend to see to it that the Koreans
have such equal opportunities in education, industry, and government position,
as well as to undertake reform of local government along the same lines it has
proceeded in Japan.”2 To Japan’s imperialists, a stress on the “sameness,” com-
bined with their aspiration to challenge white dominance, made
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Kim Brandt, Yumi Kim, Matthijs Kuipers, Laura Lee
Downs, Dirk Moses, Naoko Shimazu, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers for offering generous
and helpful feedback on previous versions of this essay.
1
For the “Wilsonian Moment” in Korea, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-
Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2007), esp. 119–35.
2
Hara Takashi, Hara Kei nikki, VIII (Kangensha, 1950–1955), 563, translated and quoted in
Mark Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes toward Colonialism, 1895–1945,” in Ramon Myers and Mark
Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984),107.
1004
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T H E R U R A L I S T PA R A D I G M 1005
assimilationism appear to better position the Japanese Empire within the moral
standard of colonial practices.3
Historians of the Japanese Empire are well-aware of its assimilationist
rule, but few have recognized it as a striking diversion from the international
norms of the post-World War I period.4 This is perhaps because Japanese pol-
icymakers and theorists, whether Gotō Shinpei or Hara Takashi, Nitobe Inazō
or Yanaihara Tadao, were heavily influenced by Western theories and practices,
and unlikely to have ignored the contemporary international norms. Conse-
quently, historians of European empires and those of the Japanese Empire
have formed opposite impressions of Japanese colonial strategy. The former
perceived Japan to have operated on its own terms, while the latter saw
Japan as having keenly followed a mixture of Western models.
This article argues that both are correct, but not by examining the geneal-
ogy or discursive tides of Japan’s assimilationism.5 Instead, I highlight how en-
tangled imperial and transnational contexts shaped the contours of Japanese
assimilationist rule at the bureaucratic, policymaking level. By looking
beyond the overlay of propaganda and examining the conduct of mid-level co-
lonial officials, we can see how the configuration of external and internal influ-
ences made Japanese colonialism both typical and unique.
Despite the risk of overemphasizing a top-down view, there is good reason
to focus on the mindsets of mid-level officials in order to grasp the logic and
practice of assimilationist rule. In colonial Korea, colonial bureaucrats rather
than private citizens and organizations took the main responsibility for realizing
Japan’s assimilationist ideal before increasingly critical international and do-
mestic audiences. The Japanese built a dense apparatus of bureaucracy in the
colonies; 48,808 civil servants (including both Japanese and Koreans of all
ranks) ruled roughly twenty million people in Korea as of 1930.6 In comparison
to French Algeria, where the large number of European settlers pressured
officials through institutionalized venues and complicated political decision-
making, bureaucrats in Korea exercised a greater authoritarian power vis-à-vis
3
See Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes.”
4
See, for example, Mark E. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–
1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).
5
For the genealogy of assimilationist policy see, for example, ibid.; Oguma Eiji, “Nihonjin” no
kyōkai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chōsen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undō made (Tokyo: Shinyō-
sha, 1998); and Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō (Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten, 1996). For the effects and politics of assimilationism in colonial Seoul, see Todd Henry,
Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–
1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). For the wartime integration, see Takashi
Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War
II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
6
Out of 48,808 officials, 17,047 (35 percent) were Korean-origin. Okamoto Makiko, Shokumin-
chi kanryō no seijishi: Chōsen, Taiwan sōtokufu to teikoku Nippon (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2008), 60.
1006 S AYA K A C H ATA N I
private Japanese settlers and Korean subjects.7 Although their presence has been
overshadowed in historiography by Japanese prime ministers, colonial governors-
general, and even private settlers, colonial bureaucrats were far from silent.
They played a decisive role in the everyday conduct of commerce, journalism,
education, and many other fields.
Among the fields closely run by bureaucrats, social work (shakai jigyō), in
particular, embodied both the ideals and contradictions of Japanese assimila-
tionism. Social work and welfare were theorized and professionalized in
many advanced economies in the early twentieth century. Social work’s
growing importance characterized the post-World War I moment, when
society suffered unfavorable consequences of industrialization and war and,
from the perspective of state officials, grew more contentious. It became a
major realm of confrontation in party politics in many industrialized
nations.8 In the colonial world, officials began to consider native welfare and
social policies as a means to defuse pressures generated by worsening social
and economic conditions.9 In colonial Korea, too, the state used social work
policy to try to engage an increasingly “unruly” society. Under the rhetoric
of assimilationist rule, colonial social work was supposed to showcase the
“humane” integration of Korea’s population while tacitly subduing opposition
to Japanese rule.
I will examine how colonial bureaucrats in Seoul designed the aims and
methods of social work to meet the goals of the empire, especially within
Japan’s adherence to assimilationism. I will focus on a paradigm that I call
“ruralism,” which in the late 1920s emerged as key to their strategy. By “rural-
ism,” I refer to a specific analytical lens and mindset guided by agrarian ideol-
ogies.10 Around this time, bureaucrats’ policy debates increasingly focused on
the rural sphere as the primary site of contestation. In the ruralist mindset, of-
ficials defined the vast majority of the Korean population as “rural farmers”
(J. nōmin, K. nongmin) and viewed most of the Korean social problems as
7
This does not mean that Japanese settlers were passive subjects of GGK rule. Their agency as
“brokers” in empire-building has been well documented by Jun Uchida, in Brokers of Empire: Jap-
anese Settler Colonialism in Korea 1876–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
8
On the politics of social welfare developed during this period, see Susan Pedersen, Family, De-
pendence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993). See also Laura Lee Downs, “‘And so we Transform a People’:
Women’s Social Action and the Reconfiguration of Politics on the Right in France, 1934–1947,”
Past & Present 225, 1 (Oct. 2014): 187–225.
9
See J. E. Lewis, “Tropical East Ends’ and the Second World War: Some Contradictions in Co-
lonial Office Welfare Initiatives,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28, 2 (2000):
42–66, esp. 43.
10
I chose the term “ruralism” to subtly differentiate it from the widely-known “agrarianism”
(nōhonshugi) in Japan. Agrarianism condemned urban culture and linked the agrarian ways of
life and morals with national virtue. Although “ruralism” shared agrarian values as an underlying
ideology, it was a paradigm within which officials understood the masses as almost all rural
peasants.
primarily “rural problems.” Ruralism reflected the global rise of agrarianism,

and at the same time symbolized the uniqueness of the Japanese Empire,
which put an ideological emphasis on anti-urban, anti-capitalist, anti-Western
agrarian values. Although Korea is often characterized as having been a
more industrialized colony than was Taiwan, the symbolic value of the rural
sphere only increased over time. In 1932, ruralist politics culminated in
massive rural revitalization campaigns launched almost simultaneously in the
Japanese and Korean countrysides.
For colonial bureaucrats, the strength of the ruralist paradigm came from
its discursive instability. It stood upon the agrarian values coming from the met-
ropole, and it was also, crucially, attuned to the agrarian ideologies popular
among Korean anticolonial nationalists, leftist activists, and religious leaders,
who viewed the Korean countryside as preserving ethnic purity. Ruralism
also made it possible to reimagine the imperial domains as divided by rural
and urban distinctions rather than ethnic nations. This served the premise of
ethnic “sameness” and placed Japan and Korea, both fundamentally agrarian
societies, in a continuous space between rural and urban. Within the agrarian
value system, the “primitiveness” represented by Korea evoked nostalgia
among even Japanese observers.11 Simultaneously, the contemporary intellec-
tual discourses that both idolized and detested the rural way of life allowed
them to both hide and maintain the colonized status of the Korean masses
behind the image of primitive peasants. In short, by categorizing Korean
society primarily as “the countryside,” officials could depict Korea as both
similar and dissimilar to the metropole.
But the ruralist lens did not function as a magical mirror reflecting what-
ever picture was convenient to those who used it, and it forced bureaucrats to
take specific policy directions. One major effect of ruralism was that it replaced
an ethnic characterization of the Korean people as being inherently lazy. This
widespread prejudice had prohibited social work bureaucrats from adopting
“mass leisure,” particularly the use of films, as a means to educate and trans-
form the minds of large populations. In the late 1920s, the ruralist paradigm
pushed aside anxiety over Korean indolence and created a consensus to
promote mass leisure, formerly seen as a dangerous tool that would exacerbate
their laziness, as one measure to revive rural societies. A screenplay competi-
tion was organized to spread mass leisure, and the storylines the social work
bureaucrats selected reveal the ruralist paradigm in action.
The politics of colonial difference under the conviction of assimilationism
is in many ways analogous to the dynamic seen in post-World War II Africa.
The end of World War I had already triggered a new era of international over-
sight of colonial policies, and the widespread social unrest brought on by the
11
E. Taylor Atkins, Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press: 2010), esp. 3, 52–101.
global depression made obvious the immediate need to provide social security
to colonized populations.12 However, in the British and French empires colo-
nial social work did not gain momentum until World War II, when welfare
finally became “a favored means of expressing a new imperial commitment”
to colonized populations.13 This shift also signaled the start of “developmental
colonialism,” in which modernization became the imperative of colonial rule.
To operate according to the new paradigm, European officials adopted a new
way of conceptualizing the colonial masses. As Frederick Cooper’s seminal
work has argued, they imposed the category of the universal “wage worker,”
a concept of social engineering familiar in European societies, to analyze
and manage colonized populations. This conceptual proletarianization, in
turn, altered the politics of difference because it required that officials “give
up their beliefs about the uniqueness of Africa on which a sense of ‘dominance’
depended.”14 The ruralist paradigm developed in Korea two decades before
already provided a similar sort of colonial strategy. However, ruralism, as an
analytical lens and ideological goal, more effectively accommodated the con-
tradictions between colonial differentiation and assimilation.
S O C I A L W O R K A N D A S S I M I L AT I O N I S M I N C O L O N I A L K O R E A
Social welfare was one of the fields that transcended the boundary between the
metropole and the colony in that it forced state officials to define their specific
“civilizing” and “modernizing” role vis-à-vis the people. In other words, de-
signing social services tested colonial officials’ assumptions about colonial
society and the boundaries of inclusion. It was in the field of social welfare
that European colonizers’ principles of racial hierarchy and their reluctance
to respond to the economic degradation of local communities were most bla-
tantly revealed. The geographical spread of European colonies produced vari-
ation in social policies, but in most territories before World War II issues of
social welfare were left to “traditional” indigenous societies and a handful of
private and religious institutions.15
12
These led to the enactment of a series of Colonial Development Acts in Britain in 1929, for
example. James Midgley, “Imperialism, Colonialism, and Social Welfare,” in James Midgley and
David Piachaud, eds., Colonialism and Welfare: Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), 48.
13
Lewis, “Tropical East Ends,” 42.
14
Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and
British Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10. Andreas Eckert argues that in
Tanzania it was focused on “peasantization” rather than prolitarianization; “Regulating the
Social: Social Security, Social Welfare, and the State in Late Colonial Tanzania,” Journal of
African History 45 (2004): 467–89.
15
For discussion of the broader trends and individual cases see, for example, the entire volume
of Midgley and Piachaud, Colonialism and Welfare; Lewis, “Tropical East Ends”; James Midgley,
“Colonialism and Welfare: A Post-Colonial Commentary,” Journal of Progressive Human Services
9, 2 (1998): 31–50; James Midgley, Professional Imperialism: Social Work in the Third World
(London: Heinemann, 1981).
At first the Japanese Empire was no exception and kept a low profile in
providing social services. Like their European counterparts, most Japanese ad-
vocates of imperial expansion, and colonial officials, embraced the goal of
bringing modernization and enlightenment to newly acquired territories.16
Yet, like Europeans, Japanese colonizers kept colonial social policies small
in scale and ad hoc; they regarded them as strategic tools to advertise the Jap-
anese emperor’s benevolence.17 In the 1910s, for example, the Government-
General in Korea (GGK) conducted small projects to alleviate poverty and
provide food, shelter, and education, while at the same time it violently sup-
pressed resistance.18 From a different angle, the engagement (and the lack
thereof) during this period indicates that colonial policies here were linked
closely to the domestic situation of the metropole and reflected the fiscal aus-
terity in the post Russo-Japanese War economy.19 Most importantly, the early
projects defined the colonial government as a main architect of social services,
although Japanese and foreign (mostly American) religious groups also ran
their own orphanages and poverty-relief projects.20
The critical divergence from other colonial social welfare approaches
came after the March First Independence Movement of 1919, which triggered
a switch from military rule to the “cultural rule.” While in the conventionally
“assimilationist” French Empire many missionaries and colonial reformers
had to follow the discursive rise of associationism and an increased reliance
on “traditional tribal” systems, the Japanese highlighted a need to provide
social welfare policy, corresponding to the assimilationist principle.21 Historian
Ōtomo Masako argues that in the late 1910s social welfare projects in Japan
started pursuing a new objective of maintaining social order and national
unity. Indeed, after World War I social welfare rose as a political field in
many industrial societies. In a move characteristic of the Japanese Empire,
the same principle was quickly applied to the colonies, though with lower
16
See Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes.”
17
Much like in the metropole, the Japanese imperial household funded them. Ōtomo Masako,
Teikoku Nihon no shokuminchi shakai jigyō seisaku kenkyū: Taiwan, Chōsen (Tokyo: Minerva
shobō, 2007), 97–126.
18
Ōtomo, Teikoku Nihon, 97–126.
19
Ibid., 125.
20
Sin Yŏng-hong, “Kaisetsu: Chōsen shakai jigyō kenkyūkai to Chōsen shakai jigyō kyōkai no
setsuritsu,” in Kingendai shiryō kankōkai, ed., Senzen senchūki Ajia kenkyū shiryō 4: Zasshi
Chōsen shakai jigyō (Tokyo: Kingendai shiryō kankōkai, 2007), app. 7.
21
On the associationist turn in the French Empire see, for example, Alice L. Conklin, A Mission
to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997), 174–211; Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Im-
perialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 54–89; Harry
Gamble, “Peasants of the Empire: Rural Schools and the Colonial Imaginary in 1930s French
West Africa,” Cahiers D’Études Africans 195 (Mar. 2009): 775–804. On the ways French mission-
aries who provided social services to colonial society had to follow the associationist turn, see Eliz-
abeth Ann Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal 1880–
1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 141–67.
levels of investment. Introducing Japanese-style public facilities such as em-

ployment agencies, loan offices, and public baths to the colonies was for au-
thorities a way to differentiate Japanese rule from that of other colonizers,
and to tangibly display the government’s modernizing and civilizing role to
the Korean populations.22
As social reformers, social work bureaucrats in colonial Korea, both Jap-
anese and Koreans, shared with their peers in Japan a chauvinistic attitude
toward the “ignorant masses” and a missionary zeal for transforming them.
Maintaining continuity with the bureaucracy of the metropole, colonial officials
analyzed Korean society, diagnosed its “social illnesses,” compared them with
those in Japan, and prescribed what they believed were effective treatments.23
In the 1920s, with a renewed sense that they were pursuing a civilizing mission,
social work specialists and bureaucrats decided to share their knowledge in a
new forum. In 1921, the Social Bureau of the GGK established the Korean
Social Work Research Group (Chōsen shakai jigyō kenkyūkai) in the Korean
headquarters of the Japanese Red Cross. The group’s official goal was to
study issues related to social work in Korea, publicize projects, and contribute
to the “increase of the people’s happiness” by expanding social work.24 Initial-
ly, its activities were limited to the creation and circulation of knowledge
through meetings and seminars, but they soon began disseminating their exper-
tise through other events and a monthly journal, Korean Social Work (Chōsen
shakai jigyō), published from 1923 until 1944.25
By the late 1920s, social work experts and bureaucrats planned to expand
their institutions to increase the scale of programs. They identified many social
problems in Korea. For example, roughly 13 percent of households lived in dire
poverty, more than ten thousand people lived as beggars, and frequent natural
disasters exacerbated rural lives, expanded urban slums, and raised the crime
rate. Tenancy disputes rose from fifteen in 1920 to 667 in 1931. As late as
1930, less than 20 percent of school-age children attended school. Persistent
unemployment in the cities drove highly educated elites to leftist activism.26
Yet despite recognition of these and other problems, social work programs
22
Ōtomo, Teikoku Nihon, 138–39.
23
Especially after the March First Movement, a larger number of officials were transferred from
the Home Ministry of Japan to the GGK, and their approach to social work understandably resem-
bled what they had learned in their homelands. See Okamoto, Shokuminchi kanryō, 560. They held
a less “revolutionary” self-image than did progressive bureaucrats in Manchukuo (1932–1945),
whom Louise Young describes. See her Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of
Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 291–303.
24
Sōda Izō (Aisen), “Honkai no soshiki to enkaku,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Feb. 1928), 25.
25
Between 1935 and 1939, the name of the journal was Dōhōai. In 1940 it returned to Chōsen
shakai jigyō, and in 1943 was renamed Chōsen kōsei jigyō.
26
Zenshō Eisuke, “Chōsen ni okeru hinmin seikatsu,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Jan. 1929): 2–5. See
any issue of Chōsen shakai jigyō, Chōsen chihō gyōsei, or Bunkyō no Chōsen to sense the kinds and
scopes of their reports. Kim Puja, Shokuminchiki Chōsen no kyōiku to jendā (Tokyo: Seori shobō,
2005), 369; Gi-wook Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea (Seattle:
remained sporadic and unsystematic. In Korean Social Work many authors

argued that the absence of a nation-wide (i.e., peninsula-wide) organization
was hindering the development of social work. The July 1928 issue, for in-
stance, published a list of opinions from high-ranking bureaucrats in various
departments, journalists, local politicians, lawyers, and business leaders,
many of whom complained that there was no centralized system of communi-
cation. One lamented, “Social work in Korea is incoherent and disorganized—
no communication, no control.”27
To these officials, pressed for institutional expansion, the metropole
offered a default model of a centralized line of command.28 Adopting the
common structure of semi-governmental organizations in Japan, the GGK in
1929 expanded the group of experts and established the Association of
Korean Social Work (Chōsen shakai jigyō kyōkai). It also created two new po-
sitions—president and vice president—which were held by the
vice-governor-general of Korea and the director of the Home Department re-
spectively.29 The Research Group had already included many bureaucrats,30
but the new association merged its top decision-making body with GGK
bureaucracy. It also established a local branch in each province and became
a peninsula-wide organization under the centralized leadership of the GGK’s
vice-governor-general.31 However, it was not until 1932, when the large-scale
rural revitalization campaign was launched, that social work bureaucrats ex-
tended any significant influence into the remote countryside.
During this period of institutional expansion and centralization, officials
continuously advocated that their primary goal should be the transformation
of populations through “moral suasion” (kyōka). Originally a Confucian and
Buddhist term (often translated as “civilizing mission” in the context of
Chinese history), kyōka referred to the ideological education of emperor-
centered nationalism, the spirit of hard work, frugality, and modern living
customs, or, in other words, teachings to create diligent and loyal imperial sub-
jects.32 Kyōka employed measures such as school instruction, publications,
University of Washington Press, 1996), 56. See also Kang Man-gil, Ilche sidae pinmin saenghwalsa
yǒn’gu (Seoul: Ch’angjaksa, 1987).
27
“Chōsen ni oite shakai kyōkajō hayaku chakushu subeki jigyō, Chōsen no shakai jigyō o
kaizen kōjō seshimuru hōsaku,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (July 1928): 28.
28
“Naichi shakai jigyō no jōtai, honkai soshiki no kaizō o nozomu,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Feb.
1926):13–27, for example.
29
Sin, “Kaisetsu,” 23–25.
30
According to Sin (“Kaisetsu,” 15), 63.7 percent of the members of the Korean Social Work
Research Group held positions in the Government-General in Korea.
31
Ibid., 27.
32
Kyōka could be translated in different ways, including “moral reform,” “moral education,”
and “enlightenment.” See Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7.
public speeches, award ceremonies for model villagers, youth and women’s
gatherings, night study groups, volunteer labor projects, and slogans hung in
public facilities. Kyōka campaigns by the Home Ministry and semi-
governmental groups permeated Japanese society from the turn of the
century until the end of World War II. Moral suasion became “a fixture in Jap-
anese governance during the twentieth century,” historian Sheldon Garon
argues.33 Moral suasion in the field of social work emphasized “self-reliance”
as a way to alleviate poverty. As a part of these projects, social work experts
instructed the lower-class populations to promote the efficient use of family
labor and well-planned spending.34 Young people in particular, both urban
and rural, were targeted for instruction.
In colonial Korea, the emphasis on moral suasion was similarly strong, if
not stronger, and the term was inflated to denote any policies and programs that
promoted modernizing reforms of daily customs and submission to Japanese
imperial dominance. Moral suasion was among the most popular topics in
Korean Social Work and discussed in almost every issue. Colonial officials
used moral suasion programs to confront various ideological oppositions to
Japanese imperialism. In the GGK’s annual report on governance in the jour-
nal’s 1931/1932 joint issue, colonial officials expressed worry about “ordinary
masses and youth who have a tendency to be readily stirred up by nationalist
and socialist movements.”35 The devastating effects of the Great Depression
only heightened these concerns. In 1932, the GGK increased the budget to
strengthen moral suasion campaigns, and more actively organized projects in-
cluding youth and women’s training groups, public lectures, local improvement
campaigns, and pamphlet publications.36
T H E M I N D S E T S O F S O C I A L W O R K B U R E A U C R AT S : A R O U N D TA B L E
DISCUSSION IN 1930
The methodological challenge in studying the thoughts of mid-level bureau-

crats is that, unlike the governors-general or prominent intellectuals, they
rarely explained their ideological principles explicitly. They wrote many arti-
cles in their journals, but often limiting their topics to administrative news, pro-
cedures, statistics, and at best policy analyses, leaving abstract theories that
would link their conduct with the legitimacy of Japanese rule to higher-ups
or guest writers. That does not mean they had no political-ideological prefer-
ences in establishing their relationship with colonial society. For one thing,
their manner of writing itself was a manifestation of their self-designated
role as primarily issue-based professionals rather than colonialists, sharing
33
Ibid., 20.
34
Ibid., 40–49.
35
Chōsen sōtokufu, Chōsen shisei nenpō 1931/2 (Keijō: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1933), 181–82.
36
Ibid.
concerns and analytical skills with the middle-class activists and influential bu-
reaucrats in the metropole. But historians have to discern their unwritten codes
of conduct from their manners of analyses and policy-making, rather than ex-
pecting to find them in their own phrases.
For the purpose of detecting the ideological assumptions of social work
bureaucrats, one exceptionally helpful document is the transcription (most
likely heavily edited) of a roundtable discussion held on 15 September 1930,
published in the October–November 1930 issue of Korean Social Work. It pre-
sents some direct voices of seven social work bureaucrats,37 all members of the
Association of Korean Social Work: Kamiuchi Hikosaku (the chief of the
Social Bureau), Ǒm Ch’ang-sǒp (administrator of the Home Department),
Okuyama Senzō, Watanabe Tetsuo, Yi Kak-chong, and Satō Yoshiya (commis-
sioned officers), and Kikuchi Taketomo (a secretary to the association and
editor of the journal).38 Two of these men, Ǒm and Yi, were Korean officials
who had pursued and would continue their careers as GGK officials, and the
others were Japanese who had settled in Korea between 1913 and 1920. Two
topics were on the agenda: the direction in which Korean social work should
develop, and the guiding principle of social moral suasion. But the printed
article reflects the discussion’s loose structure and the fluid, repetitive, and
often incoherent nature of what people said. The format of a roundtable discus-
sion, unlike an essay, revealed their inconsistent attitudes toward colonial social
work and allowed their diverse concerns and goals to come out.
Their embrace of assimilationism as a guiding principle is clear in the
piece in their unstated but shared efforts to transplant the Japanese ways of
social work into colonial society. The most telling sign of their internalization
of assimilationist logic is what was not discussed, or at least not printed in the
article. They avoided all mention of colonialism, and phrases that would accen-
tuate Japan’s position as a colonizer, such as “colonial,” “colony,” or even
37
“Shakai jigyō zadankai,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Oct./Nov. 1930): 25–41.
38
The backgrounds of some of these figures can be found in colonial government employee
records. The highest-ranking official among them, Kamiuchi Hikosaku, was born in Ōita Prefecture
in 1890, graduated from the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1916, arrived in Korea in 1919 after
working for a mining company in Japan, and had been serving in various offices of the GGK.
Okuyama Senzō started his career in the GGK in 1913 and in 1929 published a Korean language
textbook for Japanese readers (“Chōsengo taisei”). Satō Yoshiya came to Korea in 1920. Ǒm
Ch’ang-sǒp was an elementary schoolteacher in Kyŏnggi Province as of 1921, and was working
as the head of the Social Bureau of the Education Department in 1935. For their records, see
Kuksa p’yǒngch’ang wiwǒnhoe, Han’guksa Teit’abeisǔ [The Korean history database], db.
history.go.kr (accessed 15 Apr. 2015). In the past few decades, Yi Kak-chong has received political
attention as one of the major “pro-Japanese” traitors. Born in 1888, Yi studied at Waseda University
and began working for the colonial government in 1911. He became one of the powerful promoters
of Japan’s “imperialization” movement between 1937–1945 and, most famously, wrote the “Oath of
the Imperial Subject,” which Korean children and youth were forced to recite at school. Pak Chun-
sǒng, “Yi Kak-chong: Hwangkuk sinminhwa undong e gisu,” in Panminjok munjae yǒn’gusǒ, ed.,
Ch’inIlp’a 99-in, (Seoul: Tolbegae, 1993), 44–50. Both Ǒm and Yi were among the 3,090 “pro-
Japanese traitors” listed by a governmental committee in 2005.
“assimilation.” Instead, they used terms familiar to the realm of Japanese social
work, such as “moral suasion,” “social education,” and “social illnesses.”
Using these terms helped them appear detached from the political reality of
ethnic dominance and subjugation and emphasized their professional expertise.
Toward the end of the discussion Kamiuchi finally brought up a phrase “the
annexation of Korea” to argue that social work experts should not be concerned
with such political technicalities.39 The participants presented social work pro-
grams much as the Japanese home government and the GGK did—Korea’s
problems were matters of adjustment rather than of difference in kind.
Despite the avoidance of the word “colonial,” the goal of transforming
Korean populations was, as implied by the assimilative civilizing mission of
any empire, imperial in nature and grounded in an assumption of ethnic hierar-
chy. Yi and Kamiuchi emphasized the primitive nature of the Korean popula-
tion. Kamiuchi remarked, “Although this is a rough way to put it, even if a
thousand or two people die, Korea won’t [collapse], but it is helpless if the
minds of young people, who shoulder the future of Korea, are not yet
formed [through moral suasion].”40 These social work bureaucrats’ embrace
of the colonizer’s mentality so evident in these passing remarks, and
common in Korean Social Work articles, makes their reticence about Korea’s
status as colonized stand out all the more. The assimilationist rhetoric that
valued the “sameness” of two ethnic worlds and the nature of the expertise-
driven field of social work produced an uncomfortable façade.
At the same time, the roundtable revealed their multifaceted worldviews,
which cannot be captured by the simple dichotomies of colonizer and colonized
or civilized and primitive. One element that added complexity was the cohesive
group consciousness colonial bureaucrats shared, which, at least in their writ-
ings, transcended ethnic boundaries. Throughout the journal, the differences
between Korean and Japanese officials’ social backgrounds and positions
were nowhere to be found. Given the extremely limited venues of social mobil-
ity for Korean elites, it is unlikely the roundtable participants all shared the
same personal and social pressures, yet they emphasized their communal
bond. One way they enhanced their common identity was by expressing
shared frustrations with the home government in the metropole. All voiced dis-
appointment at the metropole’s failure to provide a guiding principle for moral
suasion in Korea. This attitude among colonial officials was not limited to the
field of social work. The GGK as a whole had developed a tight network of
personnel and governing offices throughout the peninsula, and Okamoto
Makiko argues that this fostered a collective identity among colonial bureau-
crats, including both Korean and Japanese officials. GGK officials often tried
to avoid interventions by the home government, and this made the GGK’s
39
“Shakai jigyō zadankai,” 40.
40
Ibid., 35.
political and fiscal independence a contentious issue in Japanese domestic pol-

itics.41 For these officials to present themselves as a group of apolitical experts
criticizing the shortcomings of the home government was a political statement
in and of itself.42
Another element that shaped their mindset was their shared desire to
obtain more resources and respect for social work projects, partly due to pro-
fessional conviction and partly as a way to satisfy their sense of self-
importance. The first problem addressed in the roundtable discussion, raised
by Yi, was that social work projects were not accompanied by adequate public-
ity.43 These officials were puzzled by how difficult it was to convince the
Korean population of the value of social work, and by that population’s
general lack of enthusiasm. It was in responding to the challenge of proving
their worth that the social work bureaucrats realized they needed to analyze
social dynamics specific to Korea. It is clear that the lack of support from
the population resulted mostly from the fact of colonization, but the bureaucrats
ignored that and instead broached a series of rather naive questions: Who con-
stituted Korean society? To which group of people should they give priority;
Koreans or Japanese, rural or urban, rich or poor? How should they understand
the difference between Japanese and Korean society?
Even a casual attempt to answer these questions would make obvious that
Korean society was not going to provide middle-class allies for these officials.
As David Ambaras has argued, in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) it was new middle-
class professionals in collaboration with government officials who identified
social problems and demonstrated their “solutions” to the population. The
“new, urbanized, middle class of white-collar workers” exercised irreplaceable
power to formulate social values by offering expert “social knowledge.”44 They
intervened in all aspects of daily life—work habits, hygiene, consumption pat-
terns, clothing, housing, and education—and imposed their middle-class norms
on both the upper and lower classes.45 These reformers actively cooperated
41
Okamoto, 491–563. She argues that the GGK’s governing system was even more centralized
than Japan’s, and enjoyed closer connections between the central and local governments. The per-
sonnel usually flowed from Japan to Korea, except for a small number of political appointees who
went back to Japan after several years. Mid-level bureaucrats normally remained in Korea for
decades, as represented by the social work bureaucrats who participated in the 1930 roundtable.
The stability in personnel created a basis for a meritocratic system.
42
See Namiki Masato, “Shokuminchiki Chōsenjin no seiji sanka ni tsuite—Kaihōgoshi tono
kanren ni oite,” Chōsenshi kenkyūkai ronbunshū, 81 (Oct. 1993): 40; Hamaguchi Yūko, Nihon
tōchi to higashi Ajia shakai: Shokuminchiki Chōsen to Manshū no hikaku kenkyū (Tokyo: Keisō
Shobō, 1996), 28–29.
43
44
David R. Ambaras, “Social Knowledge, Cultural Capital, and the New Middle Class in Japan,
1895–1912,” Journal of Japanese Studies 24, 1 (1998): 1–33, 1.
45
See ibid., 1–9; Sheldon Garon, “From Meiji to Heisei: The State and Civil Society in Japan,”
in Frank Schwarts and Susan Pharr, eds., The State of Civil Society in Japan (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003), 46–50.
with government officials and they often took up official positions. In the co-
lonial setting, however, the dynamics that had produced the Japanese new
middle class were absent, such as the Tokyo-centered education system, the ab-
olition of the traditional upper class, the rapid increase in urban professions,
and the wide acceptance of Western knowledge.46 Although a number of
Korean students went to foreign colleges, and Keijō Imperial University was
established in Seoul in 1924, the size of such upper-class elites remained too
small to form a “new middle class,” even though some of them became cultural
leaders who supported assimilationism.47 The roundtable participants, trying to
emulate the dynamic in the metropole, emphasized the leadership of “ordinary
people.” Satō argued, “If bureaucrats were dragged forward by the initiatives of
the people, that would be an indication of our success [in publicizing social
work].” Kikuchi agreed, noting that “in Japan, that often happens.”48 These of-
ficials criticized the sectors that they expected to play a bigger role. For
example, they voiced disappointment in traditional landholding literati in
rural areas (yangban) and Japanese settlers in provincial towns. Yi expressed
his frustration that both groups demanded honorary recognition or rewards
for their donations to social work projects, instead of considering them neces-
sary for society’s collective survival.49
The issue of political legitimacy and the unpopularity of Japanese rule
added another obstacle. The Japanese attempted to broaden the pro-Japanese
social base during the 1910s and 1920s. They did find some possibilities of col-
laboration, starting with the Ilchinhoe (Advancement Society), a populist orga-
nization that collaborated closely with Japanese right-wingers from its
establishment in 1904,50 and the Taishō Shinbokukai, a fraternal association
of colonial officials and Korean elites active from 1916. But most such
efforts failed.51 There were other organizations willing to promote social
welfare programs. The Association of Korean Social Work had initially collab-
orated with Japanese and foreign religious groups active in Korea, and invited
Buddhist and Christian leaders of various sects to be core members along with
social work professionals. Korean Social Work often published articles that re-
ported on the religious groups’ activities and even advertised their religious
philosophies. Some of the Japanese business communities in Korea also
46
See Ambaras, “Social Knowledge,” 8.
47
For example, Yi Kwang-su and Yun Ch’i-ho. Both promoted the integration of Korea into the
Japanese Empire and were later labeled “pro-Japanese” collaborators, especially for their support of
Japan’s war effort.
48
49
Ibid. 27–29.
50
See Yumi Moon, Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of
Korea, 1896–1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
51
Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 103–11, 158–65.
provided funding for social work projects.52 But these groups did not constitute
a wide base in Korean society, nor did they all share the same social values,
educational and economic backgrounds, or goals. In the end, the colonizer’s
anxiety about anti-colonial movements blocked any real synthesis of state of-
ficials and private social reformers. Discussion of the issue of a support base
led the roundtable participants to the natural conclusion that the role of
social work bureaucrats had to be enhanced and they had to act as “the new
middle class” that could bridge the state and society.
In the meantime, these officials shared with their counterparts in Japan an
acute sense of crisis. State officials in both Japan and Korea faced increasing
social complexity over the course of the 1920s. The social sphere expanded
and challenged imperial bureaucracy, particularly in the form of contentious
politics: political party rivalries, tenancy and labor disputes, and growing anti-
imperial, socialist, and communist activism. The new “cultural rule” in Korea
allowed the circulation of Korean-language newspapers, Tonga ilbo and
Chosǒn ilbo, and expanded the sphere of communication among educated
Koreans in provincial towns. These newspapers encouraged readers to form
local youth groups to promote nationalist campaigns. Around this time anti-
colonial communist activists also expanded their networks and some of their
groups joined the Communist International. By the mid-1920s, a number of
communist and nationalist organizations had been established in every
county capital, and they were competing with each other.53 While a vibrant
public sphere emerged, the cultural and economic gaps between the urban
and the rural widened throughout the empire. In both Japan and Korea, increas-
ing migration from the stagnant agricultural sector to urban cities became a phe-
nomenon called “city-going fever.” Although financial difficulties had for
decades been forcing peasants to relocate, not until the 1920s did the lure of
urban cosmopolitan culture become so intense, especially for young people.
These phenomena heightened state officials’ fears about the spread of anti-
establishment attitudes across urban and rural spheres.
Facing these new social tensions, Japanese officials sought to conceptual-
ize and understand “society.” Norisugi Yoshihisa, a prominent bureaucrat in
Japan’s Home Ministry, for example, defined society as “an organic group con-
sisting of people who share a collective purpose.” Norisugi further developed
the previous emphasis on moral suasion into a more systematic “social educa-
tion.” Compared to moral suasion, a concept that assumed the supreme impor-
tance of the imperial state over individuals, the idea of “social education” aimed
52
Sōda Izō, “Chōsen shakai jigyō o shinkō seyo,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Sept. 1925): 31. For a
perspective from Japanese business people, see Chōjiya shōten, Chōjiya shōshi (Tokyo: Yumani
shobō, 2002 [1936]).
53
Sayaka Chatani, “Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea
1895–1945” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 58–91.
to help individuals acquire qualities that would make them good members of
society, including the spirit of social cooperation, public service, and self-
reliance.54 After World War I, Norisugi saw Japan “standing at the fork
between the path to a first-rate state and a retreating path toward a third-rate
state,”55 and that a strong society was a prerequisite for becoming a first-rate
global power. To remedy the underdevelopment of “society,” officials like Nor-
isugi furthered emphasized the “improvement of daily life,” “mass leisure,” and
“physical exercise.”56
This desire these officials had to shape “society” to meet the goals of the
national-imperial state, already powerfully reflected in earlier moral suasion
campaigns, burgeoned during the period of contentious politics. In Korea,
the need to counter unruly “society” was felt even more urgently because insti-
tutions of moral suasion and social work had reached neither the urban nor the
rural populations. Social work officials saw starving peasants flooding into
large cities—including a growing number of itinerant beggars in Seoul—but
they lacked any measures to mitigate the problem.57 The roundtable discussants
expressed the resulting pressure they felt and their sense of urgency through the
analogy of an organic body: Korean society was “gravely sick” and “plagued
with multiple illnesses,”58 and social work officials, like medical professionals,
were responsible for diagnosing the illnesses and devising appropriate treat-
ments as quickly as possible.
The roundtable made clear that they pursued a combination of several
goals, including to adhere to the assimilationist principle, adjust to
Korea-specific social conditions, give more publicity to social work, contain
social problems, and maintain colonial officials’ cohesive identity vis-à-vis
the metropole. Behind their aspirations their exasperation was palpable.
Their goals were often contradictory: striving to apply the Japanese style of
social work while challenging its authority; wanting to play a bigger role but
securing no institutional resources; aspiring to work strictly as professionals
with expert knowledge while being colonizers who lacked popular support.
Their frustration led them to take one particular direction: ruralism.
54
Matsuda Takeo, “Norisugi Yoshihisa no shakai kyōikuron no keisei to sono tokushitsu,” in
Shinkai Hideyuki, ed., Gendai Nihon shakai kyōikushiron (Tokyo: Gakujutsu shuppankai, 2002),
56–59.
55
Norisugi Yoshihisa, Shakai kyōiku no kenkyū, (Tokyō: Dōbunkan, 1923), 251. He coined the
term “shakai kyoiku” (social education) to juxtapose with “school education.”
56
Kobayashi Yoshihiro, “Teikoku shakai kyōiku kanryō ni okeru ‘shakai’ no hakken to ‘shakai
kyōiku,’” in Shibunkaku shuppan, ed., Nihon kyōikushi ronsō (Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan, 1988),
47–54.
57
Ōtomo shows that the populations of Seoul, Incheon, and Kaesong increased by thirty thou-
sand people between 1932 and 1934, a figure five times greater than the natural increase of the pop-
ulation (Teikoku Nihon, 237). Of those domestic immigrants to the cities, 65 percent explained that
they moved “owing to the poverty.” Also see Zenshō Eisuke, “Chōsen ni okeru hinmin seikatsu,”
Chōsen shakai jigyō (Jan. 1929): 2–5.
58
“RURALZING” KOREAN SOCIETY

I argue that these social work bureaucrats, adrift on a sea of frustration, in the
late 1920s adopted a new paradigm to guide their policy-making—they resort-
ed to applying the lens of “ruralism” to conceptualize the Korean masses. By
emphasizing that Korea was a predominantly rural society compared to
Japan, they perceived the “social illnesses” of Korean society as those problems
that typified rural farmers and farming villages: illiteracy, poverty, supersti-
tions, anachronistic customs, and a dearth of educational and cultural facilities,
social opportunities, and leisure. Colonial bureaucrats made no declaration that
they would employ the ruralist analytical lens, but there is ample circumstantial
evidence that they did so. For example, in 1928 Yi Kak-chong analyzed
“Korean rural problems” in the journal Korean Local Administration
(Chōsen chihō gyōsei), and elaborated on farmers’ financial hardships and
their city-going fever. He even called for “the establishment of the Way of
the Farmer” (J. nōmindō, K. nongmindo) to overcome rural problems.59 In
the 1930 roundtable discussion, as well, the participants discussed rural-
centered social work as the “Korean way” as opposed to urban-focused Japa-
nese social work.
Characterizing Korea as primarily a “rural society” reassured colonial of-
ficials that they could handle its governance and cope with the large and un-
reachable masses. “Rural problems” had been a familiar topic in Japan since
the deflation of the 1880s, which impoverished rural populations and rapidly
expanded the rate of tenancy.60 Moral suasion and agricultural production
had been interlinked in governmental campaigns since the Meiji period, as
seen in the famous Local Improvement Movement (1906–1918) and its off-
spring, the Movement to Foster the People’s Strength (1919–1931). Over the
course of the 1910s and 1920s, state officials had established networks of
youth associations and army reservist groups throughout the countryside.61
Through these networks, social reformers in Japan raised their profile as
experts capable of influencing and disciplining rural populations to increase
production, ease tensions between landlords and tenants, and promote diligence
as a sign of loyalty to the emperor.
In Korea, by contrast, colonial officials during the 1910s had found few
ways to engage with the rural sphere. The need to quickly extend effective
rule over the countryside became urgent after the March First Movement,
during which, of the thousands of demonstrators arrested, four times more
59
Yi Kak-chong, “Chōsen nōson no mondai,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (Sept. 1928): 18–25.
60
Ann Waswo, “The Transformation of Rural Society 1900–1905,” in Peter Duus, ed., The
Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 543.
61
See Richard Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the
Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
were agricultural workers than urban teachers and students.62 In the late 1920s
and early 1930s, colonial officials produced a large number of articles analyz-
ing Korean rural problems, in Korean Social Work, Korean Local Administra-
tion, and Education in Korea (Bunkyō no Chōsen). Social work experts
repeatedly “ruralized” the issues of Korean society by arguing, “that agriculture
is the basis of the nation is the principle of rule in Korea as well,” “rural resi-
dents in Korea, consisting of 80 percent of the total population, are in an emer-
gency situation,” and “rural development is the policy of primary
importance.”63 During this same period the GGK endorsed on-site research
into and monographs about rural tenancy, production, finances, customs, and
reforms, increasingly equating Korea with rural areas.64
The colonial government was not alone in casting the image of rural
farmers (nongmin) over society at large. Korean nationalists were eagerly
adopting and promoting the global trend of agrarian romanticism in the
1920s. Korean agrarianists, like their Japanese counterparts, cultivated an anti-
capitalist and anti-urban ideology that imagined the rural villages as the foun-
dation of a new Korea.65 Young Hook Kang, a student in the 1930s, later re-
called the popular agrarian ideal expressed by nationalist leaders: “In those
days, we were fond of reading novels such as Yi Kwang-su’s Hŭk, Yi
Ki-yŏng’s Kohyang, and Sim Hun’s Sangnoksu, etc. The major theme of
these novels was the enlightenment movement in the countryside. The nation-
alist leaders in these days appeared to have believed in the possibility of main-
taining our national identity and national spirit in the Korean farmers, whose
lives had deep roots in Korean soil.”66
62
Tongnip undongsa p’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe, Tongnip undongsa che 3-kwŏn (Seoul: Tongnip
yugongja saŏp ki’gŭm unyong wiwŏnhoe, 1971), 889.
63
Ījima Eitarō, “Nōson hōmen iin no secchi o teiansu,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Mar. 1931): 31;
Ueno Jingo, “Nōson shakai jigyō no konponsaku o sagure,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Mar. 1931): 47.
64
Most famously, Zenshō Eisuke, GGK’s leading researcher of Korean affairs, compiled
massive volumes on various rural associations (kye), hamlet organizations, social customs, and
clan-based communities, as well as on the Korean economy and industry in the 1920s. His research
results include Chōsen no kei (1926); Chōsen no jinkō genshō (1927); Chōsen no saigai (1928);
Chōsen no hanzai to kankyō (1928); Chōsen no sei (1934); and three massive volumes of
Chōsen no shūraku (1933–1935), all published as research material (chōsa shiryō) by Chōsen sōto-
kufu. His still serve as the most comprehensive studies of prewar Korean villages.
65
See Gi-Wook Shin, “Agrarianism: A Critique of Colonial Modernity in Korea,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 41, 4 (1999): 784–804. Clark Sorensen puts it this way: “Among
some intellectuals the Korean nation came to be identified primarily with the nongmin. The
nongmin, in turn, came to be conceived in a distinctive way as inside history, because of their sig-
nificance in schemes of evolutionary development, but as outside history, because of their signifi-
cance of preserving an essentialized Korean ethnic identity.” “National Identity and the
Construction of the Category ‘Peasant’ in Colonial Korea,” in Michael Robinson and Gi-Wook
Shin, ed., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 299–300.
66
Young Hoon Kang, “Personal Reminiscences of My Japanese School Days,” in Eugene Kim
et al., eds., Korea’s Response to Japan: The Colonial Period 1910–1945 (Kalamazoo: Western
Michigan University Press, 1974), 288.
For socialist and communist activists, who challenged Japan’s colonial

rule in a most confrontational manner, the rural suffering epitomized the
cruelty of imperial-capitalist exploitation.67 Religious leaders, too, turned to
the rural sphere to provide an alternative modernity to the Korean peasantry.
Albert Park has shown that, between 1925 and 1937, the YMCA, Presbyterian
leaders, and Ch’ǒndogyo all pursued the reconstruction of rural Korea into “a
heavenly kingdom on earth” through community building, and achieved no-
ticeable success.68 Although they competed politically, these leaders shared
the assumption that the future of the Korean nation rested in the hands of the
peasant masses. These intellectuals employed a dichotomy between urban
Japan and rural Korea to demarcate the colonizer as “the Other.”
Ruralism was a powerful ideological tool for colonial officials due to its
versatility, since it amalgamated the nongmin discourses developed by nation-
alists, socialists, and religious leaders. Instead of fighting Korean agrarianism,
GGK officials incorporated its emphasis on the rural sphere and continued to
assert that colonial officials had superb expertise in rural problems.69 The effec-
tiveness of their measures, which was especially evident in the 1932 rural revi-
talization campaign, frustrated the anti-colonial camps. Young Hook Kang
continued in his memoir, “As time passed, we had to acknowledge the crude
fact that farmers and countryside were not a repository of national spirit and
conscience as some national leaders had hoped. As long as their lives were
not threatened and the social order was maintained, they seemed rather indiffer-
ent to the nature of their leadership. In my observation, the Korean farmers
were so amenable that they had no difficulty in adapting themselves to Japanese
rule. Thus, I was driven to despair by thoughts of the possibility of losing our
national identity forever.”70
The GGK and the local administration absorbed not just the activists’ dis-
courses and rural programs, but the activists themselves. Around this time, the
GGK cracked down on the nationalist, socialist, and communist groups in pro-
vincial towns and integrated the local leaders into the colonial civil service. In
addition to reaffirming their dominance over anti-colonial groups, colonial of-
ficials now contrasted urban Japan with rural Korea in order to assert their
unique position against the home government. In the roundtable discussion,
Kikuchi “ruralized” Korea to highlight a contrast with the metropole: “It is in-
evitable to move toward the countryside if Korea is doing Korea’s unique social
67
Chatani, “Nation-Empire,” 83–85; Sorensen, “National Identity,” 302–3.
68
Albert L. Park, Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Oc-
cupied Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2015).
69
See Gi-Wook Shin and Do-Hyun Han, “Colonial Corporatism: The Rural Revitalization Cam-
paign, 1932–1940,” in Michael Robinson and Gi-Wook Shin, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 82–83.
70
Kang, “Personal Reminiscences,” 288.
work, social work that Japan could not imitate.” Kamiuchi went so far as
to argue, “Korea is far more advanced than Japan in rural-centered social
work.”71
In reality, as mentioned earlier, the Japanese government had developed
extensive grassroots programs and campaigns to mobilize rural villages, and
particularly rural youth, since the Meiji era. Agrarianism in Japan had fully
blossomed by the turn of the twentieth century, nurturing various strains of
“nōhonshugi” (agrarian nationalism).72 One of the most influential agrarianists,
Yokoi Tokiyoshi, a professor at Tokyo Agricultural College, had argued the
Way of the Farmer as the heir to the Way of Warrior,73 an idea Yi Kak-chong
adopted in his analysis of Korean rural problems. In the 1920s, all the major
political parties in Japan during electoral campaigns advocated the “revitaliza-
tion of farming villages,” politicizing the anti-urban and anti-capitalist senti-
ments widespread among rural residents. Unable to differentiate their policy
goals, parties created a situation of “competition of enthusiasm” that further
propelled the rhetoric of agrarian ideals.74 It was this shared token of Japanese
agrarianism that allowed Kamiuchi to express a sense of rivalry with the home
government. By merging the absolute popularity of agrarianism in Japan with
the central importance of the countryside among Korean intellectuals, GGK of-
ficials reemphasized the presence of “rural Korea” against “urban Japan,” as-
serting the GGK’s political significance and pioneer status in realizing
agrarian ideals in the rural-dominated empire.
At the same time, ruralism allowed them to emphasize the image of the
“backward savages” of colonized masses without rendering it in ethnic and
racial characterizations. Not unlike the France of Eugen Weber’s classic Peas-
ants into Frenchmen, the image of peasants as uneducated and dirty was prev-
alent in Japan even as agrarian nationalism extolled the purity of the
71
“Shakai jigyō zadankai,” 26–27.
72
Various scholars have discussed Japanese agrarianism in more detail. See, for example,
Thomas Havens, Farm and Nation in Modern Japan: Agrarian Nationalism 1870–1940 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1974); Stephen Vlastos, “Agrarianism without Tradition: The Radical
Critique of Prewar Japanese Modernity,” in Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented
Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 74–94; Carol
Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985), 178–204; and Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural
Revitalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 94–113.
73
Havens, Farm and Nation, 104; Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 180.
74
The politicization of rural problems in the 1920s reflected that Japanese politicians realized
Meiji-style agricultural policies required major revisions to solve the new conflicts between land-
lords and tenants. Political parties used the issue of rural problems at times, but it was state officials
who steadily extended semi-governmental networks into Japanese rural areas. On the politicization
of rural problems between the 1890s and 1920s, see Miyazaki Ryūji, “Taishō demokurashīki no
nōson to seitō 1, 2, 3,” Kokka gakkai zasshi 7/8, 9/10, 11/12 (1980): 1–67, 69–126, and 77–145,
respectively; Itō Masanao, Ōkado Masakatsu, and Suzuki Masayuki, Senkanki no Nihon nōson
(Kyoto: Sekai shisōsha, 1988), 18–26.
countryside.75 For instance, Japanese novelist Mayama Seika, who grew up in

the rice-producing Miyagi prefecture, described peasants with blatant disgust in
his famous novel Minamikoizumi Village (1907–1909): “There is nothing more
miserable than peasants. Small peasants in Ōshū region are particularly bad.
They wear rags, eat impure grains, and incessantly produce children. Their
lives are muddy, dirty, and lightless like the wall clay. You can compare it to
the life of a crawling worm that licks dust to live. Even if their bodies stand
up, many of their hearts crawl on the ground.… Just as livestock has the
smell of livestock, peasants have a distinct physique. It is easy to tell. Their mis-
erable faces are easy to tell.”76
Other intellectuals expressed a wide range of emotions regarding impov-
erished farmers, ranging from detestation to sympathy. But even proletariat
authors could not erase the stereotypes attached to small farmers, and some-
times they unintentionally exacerbated them. As professionals in charge of
“transforming” peasants, schoolteachers and local officials in the Japanese
countryside often pointed out their problems: “lacking a consciousness of
time, ignorant of the sacredness of physical labor, lacking a spirit of coopera-
tion, poor in public morals, finding little value in trust, having wasteful
customs, lacking the spirit of self-rule,” and so on.77 The social work bureau-
crats in Korea identified almost exactly the same characteristics when they an-
alyzed that country’s rural problems. When discussed in the context of rural
problems, these supposed characteristics allowed officials to simultaneously
stereotype the population and blur the distinction between the colonizer and
colonized.
In short, ruralism, as an analytical and ideological tool, gave officials a
way to both “Other” and “not-Other” the Korean masses. They needed to
wave the banner of assimilationism while retaining the power to demarcate
boundaries as they felt necessary. Framing the social issues as rural problems
made this subtle maneuver possible. The ruralist paradigm, by incorporating
the (Korean) nationalist, socialist, religious, and agrarian discourses, also
helped colonial officials to assert their unique position separate from the Japa-
nese home government.
Although it is not explicitly mentioned in their essays, their shift to rural-
ism most likely also reflected the pressures coming from outside the Japanese
imperial domains. In the late 1920s, the category of “rural peasants” was re-
ceiving increasing attentions from international society. One source of pressure
was Christian missionaries. The Jerusalem meeting of the International
75
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
76
Mayama Seika, Minamikoizumi-mura (Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, 1953), 6–7.
77
Go Chō sei, “Honken ni okeru shōgaku jidō no tokusei kanyō jō tokuni chūi subeki jikō nar-
abini korega tekisetsu naru shisetsu hōhō ikan,” Miyagi-ken kyōikukai zasshi (Mar. 1913): 11–12.
Missionary Council in 1928 included a workshop dedicated to discussing rural

problems across the globe in relation to missionary work. In it, American ag-
ricultural scientist Kenyon Butterfield called for attention to rural societies
because “the rural people are significantly numerous,” and “the rural village
or local community as a social unit is of first-rate significance.”78 Edmund
de Schweinitz Brunner reported his research on serious economic depression
in rural Korea and laid out causes such as illiteracy and political exploitation,
although he carefully chose the words he used to criticize Japanese colonial
policy.79 Coming from missionaries, who had long played a central role in pro-
viding education and social welfare services in many colonies, their collective
decision to tackle rural devastation signaled an international trend. Indeed, their
new focus on rural poverty was supposed to bolster the churches at a time when
the legitimacy of missionaries as social service providers was diminishing. In
the 1920s, the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization, and
other international bodies exerted more direct political pressure on imperial
governments to provide interventionist social programs in their colonies.80
Achieving “rural betterment” through reviving and supporting community
life was a popular theme for both the League officials and professionals in Eu-
ropean empires.81 In other words, the colonial rural sphere became a new
hotspot where the efficacy of Japanese rule in Korea was assessed by external
experts.
Such international moves in the 1920s went hand in hand with the rise of
global ideologies that constructed a dichotomy between “industrial” and “rural”
populations, whether to advocate or oppose capitalism, promote children’s
health, problematize juvenile delinquency, define national strength, or confront
Western imperialism. The link between agrarian romanticism and nationalism,
having emerged in the late nineteenth century, was now being reinforced
around the globe. In Japan, Britain, France, and many other industrializing so-
cieties rural problems and the crisis of national identity were considered insep-
arable.82 By adopting the new symbolic meaning of the “rural” that developed
78
Kenyon L. Butterfield, “Christianity and Rural Civilization,” in The Jerusalem Meeting of the
International Missionary Council, Volume 6: The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems
(New York: International Missionary Council, 1928), 7, 9.
79
Park, Building a Heaven, 97–98, 131–32; Edmund de Shweinitz Brunner, “Rural Korea: A
Preliminary Survey of Economic, Social, and Religious Conditions,” in The Jerusalem Meeting
of the International Missionary Council, Volume 6: The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural
Problems (New York: International Missionary Council, 1928), 84–172.
80
Midgley, “Imperialism, Colonialism, and Social Welfare,” 48.
81
Lewis, “Tropical East Ends,” 45.
82
For discussion of the development of agrarianism in the interwar period, see Edouard Lynch,
“Interwar France and the Rural Exodus: The National Myth in Peril,” Rural History 21, 2 (2010):
165–76; D. N. Jeans, “Planning and the Myth of the English Countryside, in the Interwar Period,”
Rural History 1, 2 (2009): 249–64; Miyazaki, “Taishō demokurashīki”; and Itō, Ōkado, and Suzuki,
Senkanki no Nihon nōson.
in these imperial and global contexts, colonial officials in Korea drew a line
between “us” and “them” in delicate and complex ways.
RURALISM AND LEISURE
The analytical lens of ruralism did not long remain a convenient tool for social
work officials. Ruralism not only cloaked their analyses of Korean society in
the idioms of assimilationism, but it also pressured them to apply the same con-
cepts used in the Japanese agrarian paradigm to Korean society. It made it dif-
ficult for them to maintain some of their most basic ethnic stereotypes of
Korean people. This dialectic was revealed in debates over “mass leisure”
that took place in the final years of the 1920s.
One program unanimously supported in the 1930 roundtable discussion
was to hold a film script competition as a way to increase public awareness
of Korean social work. Five months later, Korean Social Work announced
the competition and invited entries. The selection committee gave awards to
five fictional stories for rural entertainment. These represented a significant
departure from previous government-supported films, which had all been
highly didactic documentaries. This seemingly trivial attempt to gain publicity
would not have happened a few years earlier. Not until the intervention of the
ruralist analytic into Korean colonial rule between 1927 and 1930 did “mass
leisure,” particularly films, come to be seen as a suitable means to conduct
social work.
In the Japanese metropole, state officials had very cautiously examined the
use of films in moral suasion (and social education) programs for the domestic
population over the course of the 1920s. For Japanese social reform bureaucrats
in the 1910s and 1920s, urban consumer culture was an ongoing problem since
it appeared to cause a number of social problems, including juvenile delin-
quency, excessive materialism, and immoral sexual behaviors. Many social
work projects were designed to educate the masses in the “right way” of con-
sumption. The rapidly expanding film industry alarmed these officials because
it represented the new force of mass leisure. Norisugi Yoshihisa’s famous 1923
work A Study of Social Education, quoted above, argued, “It can be said that the
reality of the leisure industry in our country today is that it has a more degrad-
ing effect than a purifying effect for our life. The improvement and develop-
ment of this field should by no means be overlooked by educators or
intellectuals. I believe that it is extremely reasonable, and in fact quite
urgent, to plan programs on the purification and improvement of mass
leisure as one of the major institutions for social education.”83 He regarded
the problem of mass leisure as an issue of national competitiveness: “The im-
provement of citizens’ tastes has a grave relationship with the improvement of
83
Norisugi, Shakai kyōiku, 22.
ethics and thoughts of the citizens…. Especially in a place like our country
where the state of mass leisure is very immature and vulgar compared to that
in the West, we only have forms of leisure in which we aimlessly waste
money and time, and because of such attention [characterized by] a careless va-
pidity, all sorts of temptations run rampant.”84 Among popular leisure activi-
ties, he argued, films required the greatest caution. He stressed that
government agencies needed to regulate harmful films, promote healthy
cinema, and raise the population’s awareness of the dangers of the influence
of films.85
Other experts, however, endorsed films as an educational tool. Most fa-
mously, sociologist Gonda Yasunosuke warned against hasty conclusions
that films led to juvenile delinquency and generally emphasized the importance
of mass leisure in human life.86 Others discussed the potential of films as a
useful means to educate the masses.87 One film critic, Tachibana Takahiro,
agreed that films had value as a tool for social education, arguing, “The
movie has a cachet called ‘leisure’—it envelops bitter medicine, convenient
to give to the sick.”88 Because of the initiative of these experts and the
growing interest in mass leisure, state officials adopted the use of films in
social work and moral suasion campaigns in the mid-1920s.89
The problem arose when the idea of leisure was introduced into the
Korean context. The fear of mass leisure proved to be stronger among officials
there because they stereotyped Koreans as inherently lazy, and they assumed
the introduction of mass leisure would exacerbate that tendency. One author
wrote in Korean Social Work, “I traveled around all the provinces of Korea,
but I saw Koreans sitting idly and giving an absent look everywhere I went.
On hot summer days, they lie down like dead bodies.”90 A number of other
members of the Korean Social Work Research Group listed the elimination
84
Ibid., 23.
85
Ibid., 114. The contemporary academic authority on film education, Umino Yukinori, in his
studies emphasized the harmfulness of film rather than its benefits. See Iwamoto Kenji, “Gentō kara
eiga e: Meiji, Taishō-ki ni okeru shakai kyōka to minshū gorakuron,” Waseda daigaku daigakuin
bungaku kenkyūka kiyō 3, 45 (1999): 82.
86
Gonda Yasunosuke, “Minshū goraku mondai” [1921], in Gonda Yasunosuke chosakushū,
vol. 1 (Tokyo: Bunwa shobō, 1974), 16, 48. He reversed this opinion in Kōsei undō dokuhon
[1941], in Gonda Yasunosuke chosakushū, vol. 4.
87
Gonda Yasunosuke, “Minshū gorakuron,” in Gonda Yasunosuke chosakushū, vol. 2 (Tokyo:
Bunwa shobō, 1974), 352–71. Yamane Mikito, an expert and himself a producer of motion pictures,
argued along these same lines; Shakai kyōka to katsudō shashin (Tokyo: Teikoku chihō gyōsei
gakkai, 1923).
88
Tachibana Takahiro, “Yoron to shinbun to kyōka senden eiga,” Kagee no kuni (Tokyo: Shū-
hōkaku, 1925), 510.
89
For instance, the Home, Treasury, Agriculture and Commerce, Education, and Communica-
tions and Transportation Ministries held a joint meeting in 1924 and agreed on a resolution to en-
courage the use of movies to promote a thrifty life. See Pok Hwan-mok, “Chōsen sōtokufu ni yoru
shakai kyōka ni okeru eiga riyō,” Eiga gaku 18 (2004): 2–14.
90
Hosoi Hajime, “Gojo sōai no taigi to Chōsen mondai,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Jan. 1926): 21.
of laziness and the cultivation of strong work habits among the people as press-
ing tasks in social work projects.91 Ethnic prejudice was widespread beneath
the discursive overlay of ethnic “sameness” and reached into the top echelon
of politicians who officially promoted the unity of Japan and Korea. In 1927,
Ugaki Kazushige, then deputy governor-general, wrote in his diary that in
Korea many people preferred non-manual labor, and it was necessary “to
instill the spirit of ‘labor is sacred’ through the initiative of the upper classes
and the yangban.”92
Doubt in the value of leisure in Korea drove colonial officials to re-export
their warning message to Japan. Sōda Izō, secretary to the Association for
Korean Social Work, who also attended the 1930 roundtable, had written an
essay in 1927 that emphasized the virtue of diligence and the fear that mass
leisure would harm it. Sōda harshly criticized the “culture of leisure” prevalent
in Japan and presented “a theory of leisure destroying the nation.” He argued:
“The progress of citizens and the prosperity of the nation depend solely on dil-
igence. The current trend in which leisure is put first and in front of diligence
will destroy Japan. My beloved Japan is now at the crossroad between survival
and destruction.”93
Nonetheless, during the last few years of the 1920s, the embrace of rural-
ism by colonial officials swamped the ethnic characterization in their rhetoric
and by the 1930 roundtable these officials, including Sōda, had reached the
consensus that leisure was not only useful but essential for rescuing the rural
masses. The March 1931 issue of Korean Social Work, which specialized in
rural social work and consolidated the ruralist analytic among social work bu-
reaucrats, endorsed leisure as a means to restore liveliness in rural areas. Ueno
Jingo in the Agricultural Bureau, for example, argued that leisure facilities
might narrow the gap between rural and urban lives: “As a measure to increase
the efficiency of farmers, comfort them, and prevent them from moving to the
cities, I advocate giving leisure facilities to the farmers.”94 Others, too, viewed
structuring leisure as an alternative form of moral suasion that fostered the spirit
of hard work and communal bonding. Their analysis used an alternative expres-
sion, “the sinking morale of young farmers,” to address the phenomenon that
had previously provoked the image of “lazy Koreans.” Once they had switched
their analytical approach, “leisure” became a solution rather than a risk.
As a key means of providing and controlling “leisure” for rural audiences,
films received great attention. The use of films was not in itself new to the
91
See the collections of opinions on Korean society and social work compiled in bullet points in
Chōsen shakai jigyō (July 1926): 39; and Chōsen shakai jigyō (July 1928): 32, 34.
92
Ugaki Kazushige, Ugaki nikki (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1954), 82.
93
Sōda Izō (Aisen), “Nihon o sukui katsu shakai o heiwa ni michibiku michi (I),” Chōsen shakai
jigyō (July 1927): 18.
94
Ueno Jingo, “Nōson shakai jigyō no konponsaku o sagure,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Mar. 1931):
47.
GGK. In 1920, the government had created a “motion-picture team” to create

documentary films to advertise the development of Korea to the Japanese and
foreign audiences, and to show scenes of Japan to Korean populations.95 Doc-
umentary films were not yet associated with mass leisure, but were viewed
instead as a sophisticated propaganda tool. At the Korean Expo in 1929, the
GGK built seventeen screening rooms to show a number of documentaries,
and they became the most popular part of the exhibition.96 These films, includ-
ing one about Korean agriculture, were targeted at urban residents, people in
Japan, and foreign guests.97
After the conceptual “ruralization” of Korea in the late 1920s, the goal of
educational films changed. The colonial government advocated the creation of
films specifically tailored for Korean villages. Okuyama Senzō, one of the 1930
roundtable participants, discussed the use of films as a means of moral suasion
in a series of articles in Korean Social Work between 1931 and 1933. In the
opening article he framed “today’s urgent task” as “to promote moral suasion
in Korean villages that have no educational facilities.” He emphasized the
utility of films because “they could be used outdoors and educate illiterate
people, do not raise a concern of tiring people like dry textbooks, and
promote moral suasion through enjoyment and powerful impressions before
they know it.”98 He argued that a priority for rural moral suasion was “to
produce films with a Korean color” appropriate to Korean villagers.99
In this context, it is no surprise that the screenplays that won awards in the
1931 Korean Social Work competition were all fictional dramas set in the coun-
tryside.100 The Association of Korean Social Work had provided three themes
for screenplays in the competition: the moral suasion of youth, the improve-
ment of daily life, and the display of the current state of development in
Korea.101 The result, even though the call for entries had not mentioned agrar-
ian values or rural problems, demonstrated that ruralism had become the widely
accepted paradigm. These stories wove together many elements that promoted
95
During this period the use of documentary films became common in other empires. They were
a popular tool to “make the fiction of the empire a reality” in the French Empire. Alison J. Murray
Levine, Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France (New York: Continuum,
2010), 56–88. The British also used documentaries for public health education in Africa. James
Burns, “Watching Africans Watch Films: Theories of Spectatorship in British Colonial Africa,” His-
torical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 20, 2 (2000): 197–211; Manthia Diawara, “Sub-
Saharan African Film Production: Technological Paternalism,” Jump Cut 32 (Apr. 1987): 61–65.
96
Pok Hwan-mok, “Chōsen sōtokufu no shokuminchi tōchi ni okeru eiga riyō” (PhD diss.,
Waseda University, 2005), 132–34.
97
Some of these had English subtitles; ibid., 123.
98
Okuyama Sennō, “Katsudō shashin ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu: kyōka shakai no tachiba yori
mitaru,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Aug. 1931): 39.
99
Ibid., 38.
100
“Eiga kyakuhon boshū,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Feb. 1931): 15; “Kenshō boshū eiga kyaku-
hon no tōsen happyō,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Nov. 1931): 52.
101
“Eiga kyakuhon boshū.”
diligence, sacrifice, and harmony with Japanese agricultural settlers. For in-
stance, one of them, “Overcoming the Stormy River,” featured a young, hard-
working Korean man from a family in dire poverty. In the story he rescues a
landed Japanese family from an overflowing river in a storm. Also narrated
are the sacrifice of his dying father, his marriage with the daughter of the Jap-
anese family, and restoration of the village through cooperation between the
Japanese settlers and diligent Korean youth.102 Other stories in the screenplays
likewise emphasized the power of young people in restoring rural villages and
depicted farming as the most promising career.
The storylines tell us that the selection committee sought a different kind
of film from the documentaries the GGK motion-picture team had created; they
wanted fictional tales with dramatic climaxes that would entertain rural audi-
ences. A love relationship between a young couple was often the main driver
in these plots. The scripts also incorporated characters with “weak” minds
who escaped to cities and then returned disillusioned. The stories acknowl-
edged the devastation of rural villages by natural disasters, promised success
to the hardworking heroes, and contrasted a morally decadent urban environ-
ment with a tough but rewarding rural life. While wealthy Japanese settlers
played a peripheral and simplistic role, if any, young Korean men and
women were given more complex personalities in addition to their heroic
roles. Through dramatic scenes such as rescues during natural disasters and
mob violence, they incorporated many elements of mass leisure, matching
the influence of the commercial productions of the day.
At the same time, these screenplays revealed the cruelty typical of assim-
ilationist programs. The advocacy for “local color” did not mean a Korean-
centered production or Korean-language scripts. Although they were set in
Korean villages, the roles of young protagonists corresponded perfectly with
the agrarian discourse popular in Japan in this period. Ruralism substituted
for “Korean color,” universalizing the hardship of Korean villagers as under-
stood in the Japanese agrarian ideology. In fact, four out of the five scripts
were written by Japanese authors, two of whom did not reside in Korea,
which led to a direct transplanting of Japanese agrarianism to the Korean set-
tings. Furthermore, the field of Korean social work was, ironically, still domi-
nated by urbanites. The Association of Korean Social Work at the turn of the
1930s remained largely urban-based without the resources needed to reach
into most rural areas.103 This institutional limit reinforced the divide between
“advanced cities” and “backward villages,” which Korean intellectuals
already equated with the divide between colonizer and colonized, and the
Ikeda Tōru, “Dakuryū o norikiru,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (Nov. 1931): 63–107.
102
103
The Association had 1,838 members in 1930, but they were concentrated in Kyǒnggi-do,
Kangwon-do, and North Kyǒngsang-do, with few residing in the other provinces. Sin, “Kaisetsu,”
27.
social work bureaucrats so earnestly attempted to challenge. Though they de-

veloped a self-image as expertise-driven, agrarianist pioneers of the empire
who overcame ethnic differences, their visions, vividly represented in the
screenplays, reveal their detachment from the populations of the Korean coun-
tryside and their unmistakable sense of chauvinism, coming from the stand-
point of the politically dominant.
CONCLUSION
Ruralism served colonial officials of Korea in multiple ways, but it particularly

helped them avoid addressing the contradictions between assimilationist prin-
ciples and clear differentiations between Japanese and Korean populations.
Their ruralist language hid many aspects of colonial reality: the absence of col-
laboration between the state and society in promoting social work like the “new
middle class” operated in Japan; the imperial policies that prioritized the metro-
pole and produced many of Korea’s “rural problems”; and the failure of offi-
cials to understand or improve rural conditions before 1932. To a surprising
degree, though, colonial officials did embrace ruralism as more than a mere in-
strument to the extent that they modified their perceptions of Korean people.
The ruralist paradigm offered social work bureaucrats a policy map that with-
stood their increasing exposure to international politics advocating “moral” and
“humane” colonial rule. Their embrace of ruralism did not end when the Jap-
anese Empire entered all-out war against China in 1937. Instead, the ruralist
paradigm in colonial Korea continued to provide ideological coherence when
the GGK overwhelmed the Korean countryside with measures to increase ag-
ricultural production and recruit rural soldiers.
The multiple functions of the ruralist paradigm display both typical and
unique aspects of Japan’s colonial strategy. The social, imperial, and global
contexts that drove them to adopt ruralism were found in most every colonial
empire during the interwar years, such as worsening social and economic con-
ditions and the rising importance of social services, the elevated value of the
rural sphere, internal politics and rivalry between the colonial government
and the metropole, the persistent premise of colonial difference, and the pater-
nalistic attitudes of social reformers.
The parallel with some of the French colonial policies is particularly strik-
ing. In 1931, Robert Delavignette, a renowned French colonial official, cast the
image of a steadfast “peasantry” over rural Africans in his prize-winning book
Les Paysans noirs.104 Like the Japanese, French officials sought rural education
reforms in the 1920s and 1930s. Japanese and French officials also shared an em-
phasis on the “local character” in educating rural populations.105 What differen-
tiated the Japanese from the French and other European officials was their moral
104
Gamble, “Peasants of the Empire.”
105
Levine, Framing the Nation, 88.
commitment to integrating Korean people into the imperial system and the
latter’s embrace of a deep distinction between idealized “native tribes” and the
European system. In these contrasting discursive contexts, attaching the image
of “rural peasants” to colonized populations produced opposite effects. For the
Japanese, it promoted the conceptual integration of Koreans while preserving co-
lonial hierarchy, while for the French it enhanced the value of native tribes and
helped imagine “true Africans.”106
The dynamic created by the strong drive to transform colonial populations
in Korea was probably matched only by that of developmental colonialism in
post-World War II Africa. Both triggered re-conceptualizations of colonial pop-
ulations and entailed a direct transfer of many policies from the metropole to the
colonies. Both also produced incomplete and incoherent programs that under-
mined the lives of people on the ground. Ruralism, however, with its conceptual
instability between assimilation and differentiation, along with the central impor-
tance of agrarian nationalism in Japanese public discourse, gave colonial officials
more space to maneuver and even mobilize the colonial populations throughout
the 1930s. In retrospect, the ruralist paradigm was not simply a product of
Japan’s assimilationist principle. It provided a key engine that accelerated “Jap-
anization” of colonial Korea until the end of World War II.
Abstract: How did the Japanese Empire, while adamantly adhering to assimila-
tionism, manage the politics of colonial difference in the interwar years? How
should we situate the seemingly exceptional conduct of Japanese colonial rule
from a comparative perspective? To examine these questions, this article analyzes
the mindsets of mid-level colonial bureaucrats who specialized in social work.
Social work became a major field of political contestation in the post-World
War I period around the globe. Policies on social work tested colonial officials
regarding their assumptions about state-society relationships and Japan’s assim-
ilationist goals. Their debates on social work reveal that by the end of the
1920s colonial officials in Korea had reached a tacit consensus to use a particular
analytical lens and ideological goal that I call “ruralism.” In the ruralist paradigm,
these officials viewed Korean society as consisting of “rural peasants” and under-
stood Korean social problems as primarily “rural problems.” Ruralism was a
product of many overlapping factors, including pressures to integrate colonial
society into the imperial system, the empire-wide popularity of agrarian nation-
alism, global discourses that increasingly dichotomized the “rural” and the “in-
dustrial,” and the rivalry between the colonial government and the metropole.
How social work officials re-conceptualized the colonial masses and attempted
to engage with social problems under the rhetoric of assimilationism showed a
similar dynamic to the “developmental colonialism” that prevailed in the
French and British empires after World War II.
106
Gamble, “Peasants of the Empire.”

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Comparative Studies in Society and History 2016;58(4):1004–1031.

The Ruralist Paradigm: Social Work

When historians comparing modern empires examine the Japanese Empire’s

primarily “rural problems.” Ruralism reflected the global rise of agrarianism,

levels of investment. Introducing Japanese-style public facilities such as em-

remained sporadic and unsystematic. In Korean Social Work many authors

The methodological challenge in studying the thoughts of mid-level bureau-

political and fiscal independence a contentious issue in Japanese domestic pol-

“RURALZING” KOREAN SOCIETY

For socialist and communist activists, who challenged Japan’s colonial

countryside.75 For instance, Japanese novelist Mayama Seika, who grew up in

Missionary Council in 1928 included a workshop dedicated to discussing rural

RURALISM AND LEISURE

GGK. In 1920, the government had created a “motion-picture team” to create

social work bureaucrats so earnestly attempted to challenge. Though they de-

Ruralism served colonial officials of Korea in multiple ways, but it particularly

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