Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896-1910

by Yumi Moon

Overview

An empire invites local collaborators in the making and sustenance of its colonies. Between 1896 and 1910, Japan's project to colonize Korea was deeply intertwined with the movements of reform-minded Koreans to solve the crisis of the Choson dynasty (1392–1910). Among those reformers, it was the Ilchinhoe (Advance in Unity Society)—a unique group of reformers from various social origins—that most ardently embraced Japan's discourse of "civilizing Korea" and saw Japan's colonization as an opportunity to advance its own "populist agendas." The Ilchinhoe members called themselves "representatives of the people" and mobilized vibrant popular movements that claimed to protect the people's freedom, property, and lives. Neither modernist nor traditionalist, they were willing to sacrifice the sovereignty of the Korean monarchy if that would ensure the rights and equality of the people.

Both the Japanese colonizers and the Korean elites disliked the Ilchinhoe for its aggressive activism, which sought to control local tax administration and reverse the existing power relations between the people and government officials. Ultimately, the Ilchinhoe members faced visceral moral condemnation from their fellow Koreans when their language and actions resulted in nothing but assist the emergence of the Japanese colonial empire in Korea. In Populist Collaborators, Yumi Moon examines the vexed position of these Korean reformers in the final years of the Choson dynasty, and highlights the global significance of their case for revisiting the politics of local collaboration in the history of a colonial empire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801467943
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Yumi Moon is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

IntroductionChapter 1: The Korean Reformist Movements and the Late Chosôn StateChapter 2: People and Foreigners: The Northwestern Provinces, 1896–1904Chapter 3: Sensational Campaigns: The Russo-Japanese War and the Ilchinhoe's Rise, 1904–1905Chapter 4: Freedom and the New Look: The Culture and Rhetoric of the Ilchinhoe MovementChapter 5: The Populist Contest: The Ilchinhoe's Tax Resistance, 1904–1906Chapter 6: Subverting Local Society: Ilchinhoe Legal Disputes, 1904–1907Chapter 7: The Authoritarian Resolution: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese, 1904–1910ConclusionIndex

What People are Saying About This

Alexis Dudden

Yumi Moon gives us a trenchant and thoughtful history of the so-called Pro-Japan faction during the early days of Japan's colonization of Korea. Deeply researched and provocatively transnational in scope, Moon's Populist Collaborators breaks down many lingering binaries and should be read and discussed as widely as possible.

John Whittier Treat

Yumi Moon's revisionist history of the 'treacherous' Ilchinhoe is an important contribution to the wave of new scholarship on collaboration in colonial Korea, a topic of interest not only to historians of Korea and Japan but to anyone who wants to understand how nation-states were formed worldwide under the weight of modern empires. Populist Collaborators deserves to be read by all of us wondering why events in the peninsula now more than a century old are more controversial today than ever.

Hyung-Gu Lynn

Populist Collaborators is one of the strongest books in memory published in English on modern Korea history. Every chapter is based on engagement with a range of primary sources and provides new information and new interpretations for scholars in Korea, Japan, and the West. Yumi Moon makes a convincing argument that an organization—the Ilchinhoe—that has been widely seen as having actively collaborated with Japanese imperialism is in fact better understood as populist and reformist.

Editorial Reviews

This is a bold and ambitious study that tackles the sensitive issue of collaborationand pro-Japanese groups in Korea in the period before the annexation of the countryby Japan in 1910....The study provides a rich and convincingpicture of the Ilchinhoe's 'populist collaboration', and shows how the challenge toroyal power that the Ilchinhoe constituted not only was a reaction to thechallengesKorea faced in the late nineteenth century but also had its roots in social developments and state policies in the preceding period.

Asian Studies Review - Anders Karlsson

With this monograph, Yumi Moon plugs one hitherto gaping hole in the history of the years that preceded Japanese annexation. Additionally, she offers a sophisticated argument on collaboration that will prove useful for those examining this behavior over the colonial period, as well as Korea's post-liberation handling of this colonial dreg.

The American Historical Review - Mark E. Caprio

The most notorious Korean organization, denounced by many (then and today) for its treasonous role in the 1910 Japanese annexation of Korea, was the Ilchinhoe, translated by the author of this full-fledged study as Advance in Unity Society. Yumi Moon's is a bold and meticulously argued study, with incontrovertible evidence filling up all its substantive chapters.... Moon has written a very nuanced work that is sure to be the subject of many animated discussions in Korean history circles.

Pacific Affairs - Vipan Chandra

Moon crafts a persuasiveargument that the Ilchinhoe and its members were not merely trying to cozy up tothe Japanese in the hope of gaining benefit when the inevitable happened and theJapanese gained control of the peninsula. She mines the reports of government officials investigating local unrest as well as petitions submittedon behalf of Ilchinhoe members to local government offices to unearth the specificsof peasant complaints against the government. Moon powerfully counters the traditional nationalistic slant of much of modernKorean historiography with her portrayal of the collaborationist Ilchinhoe, and thereligious community out of which it emerged.. giving us a broader view of how Korea changed theway it did over the first half of the twentieth century.

Momumenta Nipponica - Don Baker

The value of this book is evident. The Ilchinhoe's record expertly studied by the author is sure to elicit much debate on pro-Japanese collaboration, a topic that still raises a strong reaction in Korea's historical memory.Populist Collaboratorssheds important light on the Korean responses to the changes during the protectorate period and the interactions between various political groups. It expends siginificantly our knowledge of this pivotal period in Korean history.

Journal of Japanese Studies - Marie Seong-Hak Kim

Challenging the dominant line of modern Korean history, Moon demonstrates the existence of local and social divisions within Korea during the last years of the Chosŏn dynasty in dealing with the nation's crisis.... this revisionist book deserves scholary attention for an expanded debate over the meaning and complexity of collaboration in eastern Asia.

The Historian - Dongyoun Hwang

"Yumi Moon's revisionist history of the 'treacherous' Ilchinhoe is an important contribution to the wave of new scholarship on collaboration in colonial Korea, a topic of interest not only to historians of Korea and Japan but to anyone who wants to understand how nation-states were formed worldwide under the weight of modern empires. Populist Collaborators deserves to be read by all of us wondering why events in the peninsula now more than a century old are more controversial today than ever."

John Whittier Treat

"Yumi Moon gives us a trenchant and thoughtful history of the so-called Pro-Japan faction during the early days of Japan's colonization of Korea. Deeply researched and provocatively transnational in scope, Moon's Populist Collaborators breaks down many lingering binaries and should be read and discussed as widely as possible."

Alexis Dudden

"Populist Collaborators is one of the strongest books in memory published in English on modern Korea history. Every chapter is based on engagement with a range of primary sources and provides new information and new interpretations for scholars in Korea, Japan, and the West. Yumi Moon makes a convincing argument that an organization—the Ilchinhoe—that has been widely seen as having actively collaborated with Japanese imperialism is in fact better understood as populist and reformist."

Hyung-Gu Lynn

"With this monograph, Yumi Moon plugs one hitherto gaping hole in the history of the years that preceded Japanese annexation. Additionally, she offers a sophisticated argument on collaboration that will prove useful for those examining this behavior over the colonial period, as well as Korea's post-liberation handling of this colonial dreg."— Mark E. Caprio The American Historical Review (June 2014)

"The most notorious Korean organization, denounced by many (then and today) for its "treasonous" role in the 1910 Japanese annexation of Korea, was the Ilchinhoe, translated by the author of this full-fledged study as "Advance in Unity Society." Yumi Moon's is a bold and meticulously argued study, with incontrovertible evidence filling up all its substantive chapters. . . . Moon has written a very nuanced work that is sure to be the subject of many animated discussions in Korean history circles."—Vipan Chandra, Pacific Affairs (December 2014)

"The value of this book is evident. The Ilchinhoe's record expertly studied by the author is sure to elicit much debate on pro-Japanese collaboration, a topic that still raises a strong reaction in Korea's historical memory.Populist Collaboratorssheds important light on the Korean responses to the changes during the protectorate period and the interactions between various political groups. It expends siginificantly our knowledge of this pivotal period in Korean history."—Marie Seong-Hak Kim,Journal of Japanese Studies(Summer 2015)

"Challenging the dominant line of modern Korean history, Moon demonstrates the existence of local and social divisions within Korea during the last years of the Chosŏn dynasty in dealing with the nation's crisis. . . . this revisionist book deserves scholary attention for an expanded debate over the meaning and complexity of collaboration in eastern Asia."—Dongyoun Hwang,The Historian (Summer 2015)

"This is a bold and ambitious study that tackles the sensitive issue of collaborationand pro-Japanese groups in Korea in the period before the annexation of the countryby Japan in 1910. . . .The study provides a rich and convincingpicture of the Ilchinhoe's 'populist collaboration', and shows how the challenge toroyal power that the Ilchinhoe constituted not only was a reaction to thechallengesKorea faced in the late nineteenth century but also had its roots in social developments and state policies in the preceding period."—Anders Karlsson, Asian Studies Review (June 2015)

"Moon crafts a persuasiveargument that the Ilchinhoe and its members were not merely trying to cozy up tothe Japanese in the hope of gaining benefit when the inevitable happened and theJapanese gained control of the peninsula. She mines the reports of government officials investigating local unrest as well as petitions submittedon behalf of Ilchinhoe members to local government offices to unearth the specificsof peasant complaints against the government. Moon powerfully counters the traditional nationalistic slant of much of modernKorean historiography with her portrayal of the collaborationist Ilchinhoe, and thereligious community out of which it emerged... giving us a broader view of how Korea changed theway it did over the first half of the twentieth century."— Don Baker, Momumenta Nipponica (December 2016)

"Populist Collaborators is one of the strongest books in memory published in English on modern Korea history. Every chapter is based on engagement with a range of primary sources and provides new information and new interpretations for scholars in Korea, Japan, and the West. Yumi Moon makes a convincing argument that an organization—the Ilchinhoe—that has been widely seen as having actively collaborated with Japanese imperialism is in fact better understood as populist and reformist."—Hyung-Gu Lynn, AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research, University of British Columbia, author of Bipolar Orders: The Two Koreas since 1989 and editor of the journal Pacific Affairs

"Populist Collaborators is a clear, nuanced investigation into the earliest phase of modern Korea's troubled history of collaboration, when many chose to work with Japan to secure a new future for their country. Moon makes an outstanding contribution to Korean and Japanese history, and brings new insights into the comparative study of collaboration."—Timothy Brook, author of Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China

"Yumi Moon's revisionist history of the 'treacherous' Ilchinhoe is an important contribution to the wave of new scholarship on collaboration in colonial Korea, a topic of interest not only to historians of Korea and Japan but to anyone who wants to understand how nation-states were formed worldwide under the weight of modern empires. Populist Collaborators deserves to be read by all of us wondering why events in the peninsula now more than a century old are more controversial today than ever."—John Whittier Treat, Yale University, author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb

"Populist Collaborators is a bold and much needed book about how the reformist elites and the Tonghak rebels of Korea came together to form Ilchinhoe, one of most reviled and yet largely neglected groups in Korean historiography. In this major contribution to the increasing literature on collaboration, Ymi Moon compellingly shows the interlocking relationship between the Ilchinhoe's disavowal of the sovereignty of the Korean state and its aspiration for the equality of the Korean people, its implication in the Japanese colonial project, and its engagement with the ideology of progress, Western civilization, and modernization."—Namhee Lee, author of The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea

"Yumi Moon gives us a trenchant and thoughtful history of the so-called Pro-Japan faction during the early days of Japan's colonization of Korea. Deeply researched and provocatively transnational in scope, Moon's Populist Collaborators breaks down many lingering binaries and should be read and discussed as widely as possible."—Alexis Dudden, author of Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States

From the Publisher