Settlers and the State: Uneasy Partners

TWO Settlers and the State: Uneasy Partners Before he departed for Seoul in 1905, Ōgaki Takeo (1862–1929), a journalist from Ishikawa prefecture, bid farewell to his readers in a local newspaper, recording his determination to “permanently settle” on the Korean peninsula. “Rather than end my life as nobody in Japan,” Ōgaki explained with contrived modesty, “I could serve a millionth part of my obligation to the nation and fulfill my duty as a citizen [kokumin] by educating Koreans . and assisting the empire’s Korean policy.”1 By helping to reform Korea, Ōgaki hoped, he could reinvent his own life. In many ways, he was a typical emigrant who, in flight from the limits of his circumstances, sought opportunities abroad, and once settled there refused to “go back to being a mediocre man.”2 But Ōgaki also turned out to be no ordinary colonist—he would indeed become one of the most influential brokers of empire—and not nearly as humble as he portrayed himself. After the “conquest of Korea” (Seikanron) debates that divided the Meiji oligarchy in 1871–72, Korea became the yardstick with which the nation’s leadership measured its political success at home.3 Domestic triumphs—such as the suppression of the popular rights movement and ————— 1. Quoted in Ikegawa 1986, 79. 2. Memmi 1965, 61. 3. Dudden 2005, 49–50. Settlers and the State 97 the taming of the samurai—no less than overseas victories strengthened the Meiji leaders’ resolve to rule Korea. But Japanese abroad were far from an obedient herd. While developing their own cultural world, overseas settlers emerged as a voice in imperial politics during the for- mative phase of Japanese dominance over Korea, from 1905 to 1919. The Japanese state tightened its hold on the peninsula after driving away the Russians, but what followed was a period of fragile stability at best. Vociferous settlers and local officials cooperated in planting on Korean soil the flag of the rising sun, but not without sowing seeds of conflict. And they grew farther apart as the peninsula came more fully under Japanese control. Behind their uneasy partnership loomed a number of issues that pitted settler interests against state policies. At the core of their tension was a cognitive gap: where settlers saw themselves as partners in gov- ernance, the state treated them as interlopers. Politically ambitious jour- nalists like Ōgaki, and adventurers from home, sought a role in trans- forming Korea, each according to his own interests. Neither merchants nor bureaucrats, these migrants operated on the ground to engage in political intervention, a form of activity that became a permanent occu- pation of the brokers of empire. The settlers’ struggle for inclusion in the imperial project became entangled with the quest for citizenship. As the period of political ac- tivism gave way to the onset of the Governor-General’s rule after 1910, settlers’ autonomy came under threat from state autocracy. The ensuing conflict harked back to the agitation for freedom and popular rights ( jiyūminken undō) in Meiji Japan, and paralleled a renewed fervor for democracy in the era of Taishō. A related and equally fractious issue was the “native policy”—vaguely packaged as a mission to civilize and assimilate Koreans. The Japanese, in short, brought to Korea not only a shared mission to civilize but also the divisive politics of the kan (officials) and the min (people). These tensions, which remained endemic for decades, underscore the difficulty in separating empire-building from nation-building, the history of colonial Korea from the history of modern Japan. Colonialism, as recent scholarship has shown, was central to the making of modern citizenship. The concepts of rights, nation, and identity that gained global currency around the turn of the century were debated in imperial metro- poles, where colonial subjects were discussed as “potential citizens” and .

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