ABSTRACT
Japan played a number of mutually contradictory roles in early twentieth-century Korea. On the one hand, after the establishment of the Protectorate (1905) and the beginning of the colonization process it was the main political enemy for Korea’s independence-minded nationalists. Some of them – Pak Ŭnsik (1859–1925; mentioned in Chapter 4 as an expert in current Chinese affairs), for example – accepted the East-West classificatory scheme which implied that Korea and Japan would be lumped together as Eastern states, but emphatically insisted, especially after the full colonization of Korea by Japan (1910), on the inherent and irreconcilable differences between the two nations. While Korea had to learn a lot from Japan’s modernization experience, Koreans were everything that Japanese were not. Japan was, for example, seen as Buddhist (probably in no small degree due to the prominence of Japanese Buddhist missionaries in modern Korea, see Kim 2012) and at the same time inherently militaristic – while Korea was Confucian and more peace-loving (Yi 1980, 296–301). In a way, such a contrasting of Korea and Japan reads as an attempt to reverse the negative Orientalization of Korea and Koreans by the Japanese colonialist intellectuals typified, for example, by the description of Koreans by Takahashi Tōru (1877–1967), the colony’s foremost Korea scholar, as effeminate, obedient, lacking fighting spirit, partisan and unable to distinguish between public and private, while also tolerant and somewhat dignified (Takahashi 1921; see Korean translation in Ku 2010, 9–107). Pak and his kindred spirits, mostly among émigré Koreans in China, were more than willing to make a contrasting distinction between things Korean and things Japanese – while validating the former in a decidedly more positive way.
