The Study of Korean Villages during the Japanese Colonial Period and Colonial Modernity

This study reviews trends in the study of Korean villages during the Japanese colonial period. Such an exercise is carried out in order to summarize the research-related issues that have emerged over time, and to suggest a desirable future direction for this particular field of study. Villages were the basic units in which peasants’ everyday lives unfolded, and the lowest unit in terms of the state’s governance of its people. They served as dynamic spaces in which the autonomy of the people and the governance of the state encountered and came into conflict with one another. In this respect, the study of Korean villages during the Japanese colonial period makes it possible to perceive colonial modernity from the bottom-up viewpoint. More to the point, this can be achieved by analyzing the relationships between ‘control and autonomy’ and ‘tradition and modernity’ that took form amidst the people’s everyday lives. The studies of villages during the Japanese colonial period, a field which started to come into its own during the 1990s, have been conducted as part of the wider study of the colonial government’s rural control policy. However, recent studies have moved beyond the field of the history of policy and approached villages from the standpoint of social history. As earlier studies tended to focus on villages from the standpoint of policy history, villages were in effect regarded as the objects of the colonial control policy. Moreover, the predominance of the colonial exploitation approach resulted in the autonomous order of villages being regarded as having been reconstructed and distorted into the government-led order by the colonial authority. Meanwhile, the recent studies have sought to identify the characteristics of colonial modernity, including the possibility of autonomousactions and choices on the part of the peasants, from the standpoint of the tension between the colonial authority and villagers. Some of the issues which have been raised in recent studies that have critically perceived the modality and characteristics of colonial modernity carried out from the standpoint of the criticism of modernity include: 1) the degree of penetration degree and characteristics of colonial control over villages, 2) the changes in the internal order of villages and extent thereof, 3) the characteristics of the traditional elements which existed in villages despite the advancement of colonial modernity. This study reviewed these issues and introduced two eleme