Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920-1925 (Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies)

On March 1, 1919, the Korean nation awoke, it seemed, from a decade-long sleep. On that date hundreds of thousands of Koreans from all walks of life joined in demonstrations, with continued throughout the spring and summer, to declare Korea's natural right for independence from Japanese rule. Suddenly, that hereto for quiescent colonial population was in the streets denouncing Japanese rule and they provoked a brutal Japanese repression, leaving thousands of people arrested, injured, or dead. The March First movement marked an important watershed in the history of modern Korea. Korean nationalism had become a mass phenomenon, no longer the monopoly of Westernized, intellectual elites. A decade of harsh Japanese rule had combined with the spread of literacy and communications to galvanize a widespread Korean national consciousness. Between 1920 and 1925, nationalists in the colony relatively free to discuss social, cultural, and political issues. But the nationalist movement itself was divided by personal and ideological disputes. Moderate nationalist leaders advocated gradual solutions to the problems of independence while younger, more radical nationalists advocated social revolution and overt resistance to Japanese imperialism. In this insightful study, Michael Robinson examines the controversies in and between the two groups, and the general direction of the Korean nationalist movement during the period. He focuses on the rise of the moderates and gradualist movement - the cultural nationalists - and analyzes the origins and elaboration of its audiology as well as the major programs: the Korean Production, University, and Language movements.... This work is the first major study of the internal ideological conflict of the pre-World War II Korean nationalist movement. --- excerpts from book's dustjacket