Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea 1895-1945

Home , Architecture of Taiwan, Asuka period, Banking in Taiwan, Beipu, Cabinet of Japan, Caotun

Sayaka Chatani

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2014

Sayaka Chatani

Abstract

Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization Japan, Taiwan, and Korea 1895-1945

Sayaka Chatani

By the turn of the twentieth century, “rural youth” came to symbolize the spirit of hard work, masculinity, and patriotism. The village youth associations, the seinendan, as well as a number of other youth training programs, carried that ideal and spread it all over the Japanese empire. This dissertation examines how the movement to create “rural youth” unfolded in different parts of the empire and how young farmers responded to this mobilization. By examining three rural areas in Miyagi (northern Japan), Xinzhu (Taiwan), and South

Ch’ungchǒng (Korea), I argue that the social tensions and local dynamics, such as the divisions between urban and rural, the educated and the uneducated, and the young and the old, determined the motivations and emotional drives behind youth participation in the mobilization.

To invert the analytical viewpoint from the state to youth themselves, I use the term “Rural

Youth Industry.” This indicates the social sphere in which agrarian youth transformed themselves from perpetual farmers to success-oriented modern youth, shared an identity as “rural youth” by incorporating imperial and global youth activism, and developed a sense of moral superiority over the urban, the educated, and the old. The social dynamics of the “Rural Youth

Industry” explain why many of these youth so internalized the ideology of Japanese nationalism that they volunteered for military service and fought for the empire.

This dissertation offers a new perspective to the study of modern empires in several respects. It provides a new way to dissect the colonial empire, challenging the methodological trap of emphasizing the present-day national boundaries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. It highlights rural modernity, often neglected in the urban-centric historiography of colonial modernity. It also brings together global, regional, and local histories. The seinendan were part of the global waves of imperialism, nation-state building, agrarianism, and the rise of youth. I argue that the spread of the “Rural Youth Industry” most clearly exemplifies a central characteristic of the Japanese empire, which is summarized as its drive to pursue nation-building across its imperial domains, forming a “nation-empire.” This dissertation examines the operations of the “nation-empire” at the grassroots level by comparing the social environments of mobilized agrarian youth. Situating the practices of the Japanese empire in these broader contexts as well as the specific local conditions of village societies, it illuminates the nature of mass mobilization and the shifting relationship between the state and society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement ii

Notes on Romanization, Translation, and Abbreviation vii

Map ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Making of the “Rural Youth” and the Seinendan in Imperial Japan 23

Chapter 2: Youth Discourse and Agrarianism in the Colonies 58

Chapter 3: The “Rural Youth Industry” in Shida Village, Miyagi (1900s-1920s) 92

Chapter 4: The Rise and Demise of Rural Youth in Shida, Miyagi (1930s-1945) 133

Chapter 5: Youth in a Mountain Village—Beipu in Xinzhu, Taiwan (1890s-1930s) 173

Chapter 6: Taiwanese Youth in the Nationalizing Empire (1937-1945) 205

Chapter 7: The Making of the Model Rural Youth in Colonial Korean Village—

Kwangsǒk in South Ch’ungchŏng, Korea (1890s-1930s) 248

Chapter 8: The Mobilization of Korean Rural Youth for Total War (1930s-1945) 285

Conclusion 330

Bibliography 336

Acknowledgement

During my graduate work and field research, as well as in the process of writing and editing this dissertation, I incurred debts of gratitude with a long list of individuals and institutions.

First and foremost, I would like to thank all of my interviewees and informers. This includes Huang Rongluo, Huang Yuanxin, Xu Chongfa, Chen Meizhu, Chen Jiakang, Wen

Qingshui, Jiang Zhaoying, Kim Yǒng-han, Kim Hǔng-nam, Pak Kyǒng-jung, Katō Haruhiko,

Yūki Tamiya, Katō Minoru, Taira Eishō, Yamashiro Shigemi, Fukuchi Zenji, and a number of anonymous interviewees. Only a few individuals appear in this dissertation, but all the stories they shared with me not only helped me analyze the subject of youth mobilization, but also powerfully influenced me as a person. Their generosity gave me the energy to finish this dissertation when I felt overwhelmed by the task.

During my research years I relied on the expertise and hospitality of many researchers and institutions across East Asia. In Tokyo, Koichi Okamoto gave me an institutional home in the School of International Liberal Arts at Waseda University. Tani Teruhito at the Tsuruga

Junior College and Kakeya Shōji at the Japan Youth Club accommodated my repeated requests for materials on the seinendan. In Sendai, Teshima Yasunobu and Adachi Hiroaki at Tōhoku

University, as well as Kanehira Kenji at the Miyagi Prefectural Archives, guided me through the local library and archival systems, making my short stays more productive than I could have hoped for. Nakamura Kazuhiko at the Ōsaki city hall, and Sasaki Ritsuko and Takeuchi

Mitsuhiro at the Fukukawa community center, helped me find interviewees and primary sources in the Shida region, Miyagi. Although I did not include the Okinawan case here, I am equally indebted to Nara Hiromi at the Ogimi village history office, Nakamura Seiji at Meiō University,

staff at the Nago local history office, and many others who helped me without expecting anything in return.

In Taiwan, I owe a great deal to the staff and co-fellows at the Center for Chinese

Studies, as well as the librarians and archivists in various institutions in Taipei and Xinzhu. In particular, Shu-ming Chung at the Academia Sinica and Huang Zhuoquan at the National Central

University, as well as Lien Juichih at the National Chiao Tung University, offered me invaluable insight into the local histories of Taiwan. Nor could I have conducted research without the help of many people in Korea. Do-hyun Han at the Academy of Korean Studies offered me encouragement and guidance in pursuing local research. I was also moved by the generosity of

Jong-Soon Kim in the Naju city hall, who provided me with rich local histories and arranged interviews with local residents. I owe gratitude to the residents and village administration of

Kwangsǒk for helping me familiarize myself with the village as well.

I would also like to mention the generosity of Itagaki Ryūta, Miyazaki Seiko, Christopher

Nelson, Brandon Palmer, David Ambaras, Matthew Augustine, Neil Waters, Onitsuka Hiroshi, and Miyagi Harumi, who shared information and materials with me, even before meeting me in person. I also thank many other researchers I encountered along the way. Casual and academic conversations with them always gave me a fresh look at history and academic life. This includes

Motokazu Matsutani, Shirley Ye, HyoungDuck Kwak, Albert Wu, Ryan Cook, John Schlesinger,

Higashiyama Kyōko, Tadashi Ishikawa, Chen Chih-hao, Seiji Shirane, Jamyong Choi, Sugyeong

Hong, Yi Hong-sǒk, Chang Mi-hyǒn, Nick Kapur, and many people I met at Waseda University and Tōhoku University, as well as here in the Max Weber Postdoctoral Programme at the

European University Institute in Florence.

iii

Practically, without the help of a variety of organizations and donors located across East

Asia and the US, I could not have even begun this transnational research. I am grateful for the funding received from the Social Science Research Council, the Harry Frank Guggenheim

Foundation, the Shicho Foundation, the Center for Chinese Studies in Taiwan, the Japanese-

American Association-Honjo Fellowship in New York, the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial

Foundation, and Howard and Natalie Shawn, as well as the East Asian languages and cultures department, the history department, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Graduate

School of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University.

At my home institution, Columbia University, I was fortunate to have been surrounded by an amazing array of scholars. In particular, Charles Armstrong guided me through the demanding graduate work and trusted my ability to handle the expansive topic. Carol Gluck inspired me with her passion, meticulous scholarship, and devotion to her students. Susan

Pedersen and Kim Brandt, in different ways, showed me models of a compassionate intellectual and dedicated teacher. I am also grateful to Andrew Nathan and Gregory Mann for reading my dissertation and offering me extensive comments and suggestions as defense committee members. Noguchi Sachie at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library is an incredible asset to anyone who needs Japanese-language materials in New York. Her assistance was indispensable to my graduate work.

My life in New York and Asia between 2007 and 2014 would never have been the same without a supportive cohort. Yumi Kim was not only an intellectual inspiration to me, but also a savior for my family when we faced a mad schedule of writing, job interviews, and infant care. I also owe a lot to Arunabh Ghosh, Chelsea Szendi Scieder, Sujung Kim, Alyssa Park, Liza

Lawrence, and Gal Gvili, for their encouragement and support in all areas of my life. I realized

how much their friendship means to me especially after I left New York. Tim Yang and

Christopher Craig always shared their experiences, which helped me take each step towards graduation. Christopher, in particular, helped me in the archives and shared valuable materials on

Miyagi. I thank many others, including Mi-ryong Shim, Yurou Zhong, Anatoly Detwyler, Andy

Liu, Stacey Van Vleet, Jenny Wang Medina, Shing-Ting Lin, Reto Hofmann, Michelle Hwang,

Matt Swagler, and Christina Yi, for reading or listening to my underdeveloped ideas and for sharing their knowledge and interests with me.

In retrospect, the years in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia

University and the political science department at George Washington University, before I turned to history, provided me with a scholarly foundation. I developed the question of why and how people come to embrace certain ideologies and values—especially nationalism—by studying in these programs. I am grateful to many scholars and friends for training me to ask big questions. Remembering how I struggled living and studying in the US at the beginning, I think

Konrad Mitchell Lawson deserves special thanks for believing in my academic potential when I myself was in deep doubt, reading almost everything I have produced, and making learning multiple languages a norm.

Finally, I am permanently indebted to my family members. My parents in Japan have always been supportive of my decisions, including my departure from the country and my life in various foreign places. I thank my son, Zeno, who was born while I was writing this dissertation, for keeping me focused (and encouraging me to cut a few chapters). He has already been putting up with his parents’ erratic travel plans and moves to new places. My husband, Colm, had to overcome many dramas as a co-pilot of this family while writing a dissertation of his own. If

anything was of critical importance in our survival over the last few years, it has been his perseverance, resourcefulness, and sense of humor. I dedicate this dissertation to Colm.

Notes on Romanization, Translation, and Abbreviation

I used the Revised Hepburn for Japanese terms, names, and titles, the McCune-Reischauer for Korean, and the Hanyu pinyin for Chinese. Exceptions were made whenever I found that the individuals preferred using different spellings for their names. I attached the Romanization in the McCune-Reischauer or the Hanyu pinyin in those cases. I followed the standard order of Asian names [the surname followed by the given name] except the scholars who mainly publish in Western languages. For example, “Katō” is the surname and “Einojō” is the given name in “Katō Einojō.”

I used widely-accepted English place names, including Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei. In Taiwan, Wade-Giles is more commonly used:

Pinyin Wade-Giles Xinzhu Hsinchu Guomindang (GMD) Kuomintang (KMT)

I used the same terms for administrative units in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. The administrative system changed over time, but to avoid confusion, I consistently used the terms below:

Japan: [ken] prefecture – [shi] city – [gun] county – [chō] town – [son] village – [buraku] hamlet

(e.g. Miyagi prefecture – Shida county – Shida village – Aratanome hamlet)

Taiwan: [zhou] province – [shi] city – [jun] county – [jie] town – [zhuang] village – / [dazi/xiaozi] hamlet

(e.g. Xinzhu province – Zhudong county – Beipu village – Beipu hamlet)

Korea: , 도 [do] province – , 시 [si] city – , 군 [gun] county – , 읍 [ǔp] town – , 면 [myǒn] village – , 리 [ri] hamlet (e.g. Sounth Ch’ungch’ǒng province – Nonsan county—Kwangsǒk village – Ch’ŏndong hamlet)

vii

I used the term “elementary school” consistently, but the original terms varied as follows:

Japan: Taiwan: ( for Japanese settlers) Korea: ( for Japanese settlers)

Abbreviations

GGK: The Government-General of Korea GGT: The Government-General of Taiwan PISA: The Patriotic Imperial Subjects Associations 皇民奉公会

viii ! Map

ix ! ! ! ! ! Introduction !

In the late nineteenth century, youth became the agent of history and symbolized everything modern. This global phenomenon continued through most of the twentieth century. At every major turn—imperial expansion, capitalist industrialization, nation-state building, world wars, decolonization, and democratization—people called upon the youth to stand up. The state, undergoing a radical transformation in this period, sought to control youth with strategies of co- optation, discipline, or confrontation. Youth became a primary target of mobilization in regimes of all kinds.

In the Japanese empire, the state conducted large-scale youth mobilization in the countryside of both Japan and its colonies. “Rural youth” embodied the spirit of industriousness, masculinity, and Japanese nationalism. They were to resolve the rural and national predicament, bind Asia together, and shoulder heavy burdens of the empire. Young farmers, in turn, found new opportunities for social mobility arising from the intense attention. This dissertation examines how the Japanese empire came to focus on “rural youth” and, more importantly, how young people responded to that mobilization—in other words, it shows how youth in peripheries consumed the power of the state. I argue that mutual attempts at co-optation by the state and youth accelerated mass mobilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Youth used the rhetoric of the state to gain leverage in their social relationships. In particular, they employed the

!1 ideology of Japanese nationalism to challenge the dominance of urban youth, educated youth, and the older generation. Through that social process, the youth often internalized the value system imposed by the state. This mechanism radicalized the nationalistic ideology during wartime, which in turn deprived the youth of opportunities they initially aspired to obtain. What appeared to be the “same bed different dreams” situation between the mobilizer and mobilized— often seen as a sign of the imperfect power of the modern state—in fact gave flexibility and strength to the mobilization.

I use youth training institutions built in the countryside, particularly village youth associations [seinendan], as a lens of analysis. The seinendan began as hamlet social organizations widely seen in rural Japan that governed farmers’ lives for centuries. After transforming the seinendan into modern imperial youth groups around 1905, bureaucrats and activists established a national headquarters and network in the 1910s and 20s. Viewing them as an effective model for spreading nationalism, anti-colonial intellectuals in Taiwan and Korea copied the seinendan in the 1920s. In the 1930s, the Japanese empire, in competition with them, spread the imperial seinendan throughout Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, the South Pacific islands, and Southeast Asia. During its military expansion on the Asian continent and the Asia-Pacific

War from 1937 to 1945, the state relied on youth in the seinendan and other youth training facilities, Japanese and non-Japanese, to provide military and industrial manpower. In short, the seinendan and its sibling institutions provided a rural basis for Japan’s nation-building, empire- building, and total war mobilization.

This dissertation compares three villages in the Japanese empire—one in Miyagi

(northern Japan), another in Xinzhu (northern Taiwan), and a third in South Ch’ungchǒng

!2 (southern Korea). Left behind in the urban-centric modernization, youth in these places hoped to alter their social positions through the seinendan and other youth programs. Often in ways unexpected by state officials, they transformed themselves from perpetual farmers to career- seeking modern youth. The outcome of nationalizing mobilization depended on whether youth could turn national-imperial policies into opportunities for mobility. While seeking opportunities, many young people internalized the ideology of Japanese nationalism.

Japan’s Nation-Empire and Assimilation Policies

The way the seinendan spread across the empire captures an important characteristic of the Japanese empire: its drive to establish an empire-wide nation-state, or a nation-empire.

Japanese policymakers in the Meiji period (1868-1912) commonly believed that the empire was a powerful version of the nation-state. In his lecture on Japanese colonial policies in 1914, Gotō

Shinpei elaborated on the relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Educated in

Germany, Gotō established the colonial administration in Taiwan in 1898 and became the first president of the South Manchuria Railway Company in 1906. He was one of the most qualified experts to discuss Japanese colonial policies of the time. Gotō viewed imperialism as something that grows out of nationalism and argued that Japan finally joined the trend of European

“national imperialism”1:

Nationalism, having arisen in the nineteenth century, became truly a major political force. This force provides the strong with a supreme weapon, but it is clear that, for the weak, it is rather a suicidal weapon. The result of competition for survival among European powers is that weak states were forcefully assimilated as nationalism arose. 2 !The extreme cases include Ireland, Finland, Poland, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.

1 Gotō Shinpei, Nihon shokumin seisaku ippan, Nihon bōchōron (Tokyo: Nihon hyōronsha, 1944), 49. 2 Ibid, 48.

!3 Arguing that population pressures turned strong nations into colonial empires, he continued,

“Japan was unaware of the trend of the nineteenth century in which the transition from the rise of nationalism to national imperialism generated the need for colonial policies,” and, without preparation, Japan entered the world of empires.3 Gotō was not alone in his view that a modern empire developed from a nation. We see a similar assumption in the Social Darwinist perspective, which spread across the world in the nineteenth century, challenging liberal theories on the role of the state and emphasizing survival as the goal of nations. In Japan, Katō Hiroyuki delivered a theory of survival of the fittest as the basic character of world politics and influenced many leaders in Japan and Asia by the 1880s.4 A Chinese reform activist Liang Qichao, for example, used the similar concept of national imperialism and the Social Darwinist view to explain China’s situation under European imperial powers.5

The popularity of the Social Darwinist perspective attests how aggressively Western powers acquired territory in this period. Europe’s imperialism of the nineteenth century threatened enough to trigger an overthrow of the feudal Tokugawa government (1603-1868), which led to the establishment of a modern Meiji monarch in Japan. The dismemberment of

Africa and the Pacific was rapidly accelerating when Meiji Japan joined the world of empires.

Jennifer Pitts has argued that European imperialists in the nineteenth century, compared to their

3 Ibid, 50-51. 4 Yoshida Kōji, Katō Hiroyuki no kenkyū (Tokyo: Ōhara shinseisha, 1976), 71-117. 5 Limin Bai, “Children as the Youthful Hope of An Old Empire: Race, Nationalism, and Elementary Education in China 1895-1915,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 213-214. On the ways in which Korean intellectuals and authors were influenced by Social Darwinism, see Vladimir Tikhonov, Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings (1880s-1910s): “Survival” as an Ideology of Korean Modernity (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010).

!4 predecessors, shared a widespread sense of “cultural or civilizational confidence.”6 They had long developed ideological legitimacy for overseas expansion using the language of liberalism and universalistic morality—bringing civilization to non-European “barbaric” peoples. The unprecedented economic and technological development in Western Europe in the early nineteenth century—both a result and an enabler of colonial rule—added to their justification for further expansion.7 At the same time, the “nation” came to be defined increasingly by racial or ethnic coherence, leading to anti-colonial nationalisms and challenging the earlier logic of legitimacy for colonial imperialism.8 Meiji leaders faced two equally powerful forces: the civilizational chauvinism of Western imperial powers and a world constituted by nations, or the inter-national world. Japan embarked on its modern statehood as a new nation and an empire simultaneously.9

6 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn To Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism In Britain and France (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 14. 7 See, of course, Pomerantz on the argument that Europeans did not become decisively more economically advanced than China until the very late eighteenth century. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 8 For eighteenth-century liberal thinkers like J.S. Mill, nationhood was “an achievement of civilization,” not applicable to “barbarians.” Pitts, 143-144. 9 Political scientist Tomoko Akami argues that we should understand international actors of the late nineteenth century as “the nation-state/empire” and she challenges the dichotomy between the nation-state and empire. She sees “Japan as an empire in which the problem of the international society of nation states/empires was manifested.” I agree with her that the Japanese empire captured the merge of the two most saliently. See Tomoko Akami, “The Nation-State/Empire as a Unit of Analysis in the History of International Relations: A Case Study in Northeast Asia, 1868-1933,” in The Nation State and Beyond: Governing Globalization Processes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Isabella Löhr and Roland Wenzlhueme (Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), 177-208. For discussion on external and internal conditions that drove Japan into imperialism, see Mark Peattie, “Introduction” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, ed. Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1-52 and Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

!5 In the late nineteenth century, all empires had to adapt to the rise of racial and ethnic nations at home and abroad.10 French colonizers in Algeria, while trying to transform living customs and build infrastructure in pursuit of mission civilisatrice, began condemning racial intermarriage by the 1870s.11 Duncan Bell argues that the British imagined a “Greater Britain,” a global nation-state, consisting of Anglo-Saxon settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New

Zealand, and southern Africa.12 The crosscurrent forces of empires and nation-states pushed

Japan in another direction: the nationalization of its colonial empire. Meiji leaders not only pictured the empire as an extension of power of the Japanese nation-state, but also aimed to extend its ethnic and racial nation. This drive produced many unique assimilation policies that puzzled Western leaders, making the Japanese empire an anomaly in many respects. Despite what contemporaries claimed, Japan’s assimilationism did not derive from its cultural or

10 Other historians have examined the relationship between empire and nation-state. Yamamuro Shin’ichi uses the term “kokumin teikoku,” which could also be translated as “national empire” or “nation-empire.” What he means by it is the prototype of modern empires that has the nation-state at home and a multi-racial empire abroad. Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Kokumin teikoku no shatei,” in Teikoku no kenkyū: genri, ruikei, kankei, ed. Yamamoto Yūzō (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2003), 87-128. Gary Wilder uses a term “imperial nation-state” to describe France of interwar years. With that term, he highlights the contradiction and tension created by political universalism and cultural particularism. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2005). 11 Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 20-21. 12 But the idea of “race” was still defined by the beliefs, traditions, institutions, behavioral characteristics, rather than “scientific” racial differences until the late nineteenth century. Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), particularly 113-119.

!6 religious heritage. The early twentieth century concept of the nation-state rapidly took over the notion of empire—this historical temporality shaped Japan’s obsession with assimilation.13

For many Japanese colonial rulers, racial, ethnic, and cultural assimilation [dōka] was a sui generis logic of legitimacy.14 In the French mission civilisatrice, the avowed goal of assimilation was the implementation of French republicanism, which the French claimed was universally applicable. In Japanese colonies, racial and ethnic descriptors defined the goal of assimilation, or in other words, the goal was set as to integrate colonial people into the “Yamato race.”15 The definitions of “Japanese nation” and “Yamato race,” the envisioned degrees of assimilation, and the advocated means to achieve assimilation lacked consistency. Nevertheless,

Japan’s assimilationism is characterized by its priority to make the colonized similar to the colonizer rather than to make the colonized better in the universal scale of civilization—although

13 Just to be clear, Gotō Shinpei was not a strong supporter of assimilation policy. A number of historians of Japanese imperialism have studied Japan’s assimilationist rule. Many focus on the effects, pointing out their limits, contradictions, and forceful nature. See Mark Peattie and Ramon Myers, ed. The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945; Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996); Mark Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), and many other sources offer us excellent analyses in this respect. But, to me, they are short of articulating where the drive for assimilation came from, especially in the 1920s and 30s. More recently, Takashi Fujitani argues that wartime integration policies meant an extension of governmentality. By comparing Koreans in the Japanese empire to Japanese in the United States, his work breaks the boundary of traditional “imperial-colonial” paradigm. Todd Henry applies Foucault’s governmentality differently, showing porous and messy assimilation practice in “contact zones” in Seoul through ethnographical analysis. I share the same interest in understanding Japanese colonial rule as one manifestation of the modern (“postcolonial” as they call) state, which happened to take the form of a colonial empire. Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Todd Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 14 In English-language scholarship, Mark Peattie’s piece on Japanese ideas on colonialism is still an excellent piece among all. Mark Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes toward Colonialism, 1895-1945” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, 80-127. 15 For more detail on the concepts of race and ethnicity in Japanese imperial rhetoric, see Kevin Doak, "The Concept of Ethnic Nationality and its Role in Pan-Asianism in Imperial Japan," in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders, ed. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (New York: Routledge, 2007), 168-82.

!7 the difference between the two disappeared when measuring the “cultural level” of the colonized.16

This normative goal was particularly strong in the rule over Taiwan and Korea, the two longest-standing and geographically closest colonies. The first Governor-General of Korea,

Terauchi Masatake, defined the assimilation policy in the “Proclamation of Annexation” in 1910:

“It is the natural and inevitable course of things that the two peoples [of Korea and Japan] whose countries are in close proximity with each other, whose interests are identical and who are bound together with brotherly feelings, should amalgamate and form one body.”17 The same-ness in racial, ethnic, and cultural terms increased in importance and became the premise for Pan-Asian unity over time. The kōminka policy implemented in Taiwan and Korea between 1937 and 1945, often translated as the “imperialization” or “imperial subjectification” policy, sought racial and ethnic conversion or “Japanization.” The term kōminka was already familiar as a policy to

“Japanize” or “nationalize” Okinawan people in Meiji.18 The kōminka demanded that

Okinawans, Taiwanese, and Koreans speak, eat, walk, think, and die like ideal Japanese subjects.

As a rhetorical goal, assimilation bore contradictions in assumptions and policy designs leading to confusion in practice.19 Nonetheless, the goal was never abandoned and affected policies in the same way that the idea of mission civilisatrice shaped the practice of French

16 Michael Kim, “The Colonial Public Sphere and the Discursive Mechanism of Mindo,” in Mass Dictatorship and Modernity, ed. Michael Kim, et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013), 178-202. 17 Government-General of Chosen, Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea) 1910-1911 (Seoul: Government-General of Chosen), 242, trans. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 116. 18 Ōta Masahide, Okinawa no minshū ishiki (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1976), 341-344. 19 For discussion on the policy of colonial integration and separation, see Ōe Shinobu, et al. ed., Iwanami kōza Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi 4: Tōgō to shihai no ronri (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993).

!8 colonial rule. Alice Conklin claims that “republican France invested the notion of a civilizing mission with a fairly specific set of meanings that set limits on what the government could and could not do in the colonies.”20 Similarly, the drive for nation-empire and assimilationist goals framed how Japan governed its colonies. Most of the Japanese colonial strategists assumed a continuation from the integration of Ezo (Hokkaidō, 1869) and Ryūkyū (Okinawa, 1879) to the acquisition of “outer territories,” including Taiwan (1895), Karafuto (1905), Korea (1910), and

Nanyō (1919). They envisioned Korea as a colony of agricultural settlement similar to

Hakkaidō.21 Okinawans often heard the phrase: “Okinawa is the eldest son, Taiwan the second son, and Korea the third.”22

Nation-empire building required a thick ruling structure resembling that of the nation- state. Among the empires, Japan deployed by far the largest number of colonial bureaucrats per capita. Colonial bureaucrats in Korea numbered 103,225 in 1942 for a population of roughly 20 million and 86,212 in Taiwan for a population of about 4 million in 1940.23 In contrast, slightly more than 1,200 British bureaucrats worked in the elite administrative division of the colonial service in Africa for an estimate population of 43 million. The Indian Civil Service had 1,250 covenanted members for a population of 353 million.24 In French West Africa, the colonial bureaucracy averaged 500 French officials for the population of 15 million in the 1920s.

Indochina, with nearly 21.5 million people, had a larger bureaucracy, but it only numbered

20 Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 2. 21 Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 9. 22 A quote of Higa Shunchō’s memoir “Nengetsu to tomoni,” Okinawa taimusu, March 11, 1964, in Ōta, 337. 23 Okamoto Makiko, Shokuminchi kanryō no seijishi: Chōsen, Taiwan sōtokufu to teikoku Nippon (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2008), 51 and 60. 24 John Cell, “Colonial Rule,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume IV The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith Brown and WM. Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 232.

!9 5,000.25 In addition to state employees, schoolteachers and semi-governmental organizations facilitated dense and intense rule over colonial people. Educators compared the new territories and peripheries in the Japanese countryside to strategize assimilation of local people. Moral suasion [kyōka] groups operated simultaneously in Japan and its colonies to teach Emperor- centered nationalism and modern living customs. Youth training institutions were a part of the thick apparatus of the empire.

The diversion from the European norm of colonialism became clear, particularly during the interwar years. The world community of empires largely shifted toward indirect or associationist rule after World War I. All empires became increasingly sensitive to international reputation in the system created under the League of Nations, where they set standards and watched one another’s colonial practice.26 In this new international arena, indirect colonial rule, a policy propagated by Lord Lugard in his 1922 The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, became the norm even for non-British empires.27 Imperial propagandists depicted indirect rule as more humane, more feasible, more far-sighted, and less costly than assimilationism or segregation. Various ideologies and phenomena served behind this global turn, including agrarian romanticism glorifying remote villages and tribes, democratic oversight at home over the cost of

25 Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 83. 26 See Véronique Dimier “Direct or Indirect Rule: Propaganda Around Scientific Controversy,” in Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, ed. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 168-183. 27 Cell, “Colonial Rule.” Elizabeth Foster shows a great example of how the French colonialists emphasized local customs over assimilation in interwar Senegal. See Elizabeth Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 141-167.

!10 colonial rule, an increasingly influential international audience, and new racist and eugenicist theories, as well as politics among colonial settlers, administration and the metropole.28

Surrounded by the same international conditions, however, Japan accelerated its assimilationism.29 The “Wilsonian moment” of 1919—the Korean mass demonstrations for independence and the Taiwanese movement for self-rule—propelled Japan to seek more sophisticated means of assimilation rather than turning to the British-style associationist or indirect rule. In response to the independence movement, Prime Minister Hara Takashi argued that “[t]he desire of most Koreans is not for independence, but to be treated as equals of the

Japanese. I intend to see to it that the Koreans have such equal opportunities in education, industry, and government position, as well as to undertake reform of local government along the same lines it has proceeded in Japan.”30 During total mobilization for World War II, assimilation, or “Japanization,” became a moral imperative for colonial rulers. Governor-General of Korea,

Minami Jirō, argued that the initiation of military service in Korea was another step toward completion of a united Japan and Korea. He declared, “our country’s rule of Korea is fundamentally different from colonial policies of Western powers.”31

28 See Cell, “Colonial Rule.” Conklin also shows how the new hyperbolic worship of racial purity replaced the French assimilationist in the 1920s. See Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 54-89, on associationism in the French colonies, too. 29 On the Wilsonian moment, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). On the acceleration of assimilation under Cultural Policy in the 1920s, see Komagome; Caprio; Uchida; Michael Kim. On policy analysis, Kasuya Ken’ichi, “Chōsen sōtokufu no bunka seiji,” in Iwanami kōza Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi 2: Teikoku tōchi no kōzō, ed. Ōe Shinobu, et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1992), 121-146. 30 Hara Takashi, Hara Kei nikki, VIII (Kangensha, 1950-1955), 563, trans. and quoted in Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes,” 107. 31 “Shiganhei kurenjo no kaishoshiki ni atarite,” Chōsen nippō (editorial), June 15, 1938.

!11 Placing the Japanese empire in the global perspective highlights another aspect. Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan and Korea was more cohesive and uniform than suggested by historians who have sought to stress the differences between the two colonies. These scholarly efforts may have been driven by the observation that post-1945 memories of the colonial period have diverged significantly.32 Certainly, many things differed between the two places—but there were a variety of colonial experiences across classes, locations, gender, and generations even under the same colonial government. What stands out more is the similar trajectory of the two. Both began with resistance battles and chaotic state-building before 1919, “Cultural Rule” after 1919, agricultural mobilization in the 1930s, and the Japanization policy after 1937 before colonial rule ended abruptly in 1945. This degree of similarity is rare in other colonial empires whose territories spread widely across the globe and followed their own chronologies. The cohesion emerged more easily because of the geographical proximity of these colonies and Japan. Still,

Japanese leaders had to pursue it deliberately, given the rivalry between the colonial governments and the differences in social backgrounds between Taiwan and Korea. The similarity was a product of the aspiration for nation-empire building widely shared by policymakers, bureaucrats, popular writers, and colonial teachers.

This dissertation attempts to show both the similarity resulting from the aspiration for nation-empire building and the differences in the reception of the nationalizing or assimilating efforts at the local level. Rural youth training was one device to create a nationalistic population

32 It is often argued that Taiwanese share more positive memories about the Japanese rule than Koreans. Many argue that the postcolonial political situations—the “neo-colonialism” by the Guomindang in Taiwan—influenced the formation of their memories. One example of comparison is Wan-yao Chou’s article on the comparison of kōminka in Taiwan and Korea. Wan-yao Chou, “The Kōminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interpretations,” in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945, ed. Peter Duus and Ramon Myers (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 40-68.

!12 in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. It did not begin simultaneously or achieve the same result.

Nevertheless, rural youth training shows how the drive for nation-empire produced a broad pattern across the empire, creating the unique kind of oppression and social opportunities in the rural peripheries.

Rural Youth as an Analytical Category

The focus of this dissertation is not the policy formation of nationalization and assimilation but the translation of state mobilization to the local context.33 I chose rural male youth to analyze the local point of view. They were one of the most important targets of nationalization in Japan and assimilation in Taiwan and Korea. Because the popular term “rural youth” [nōson seinen] assumed male gender, men experienced direct exposure to the discourse and practice of rural youth mobilization. Women were, of course, no less important. Young women in the countryside, too, were intensively mobilized, but because their social statuses and norms were different from those of their male counterparts, they deserve a separate narrative from what this dissertation presents.34

Viewing the nationalization and assimilation policies from the perspective of young men in the countryside helps us maintain distance from “the state’s own prose” and explore “how the state appears in everyday and localized forms,” as anthropologists Thomas Blom Hansen and

33 Many other scholars have engaged in local histories as a method to investigate larger trends and mechanisms. Examples with close relevance to this dissertation include Matsuda Toshihiki and Jun Jungwon, eds., Chiiki shakai kara miru teikoku Nihon to shokuminchi: Chōsen, Taiwan, Manshū (Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan, 2013); Kawanishi Hidemichi, Namikawa Kenji, and M William Steele eds., Rōkaru historī kara gurōbaru historī e (Tokyo: Iwata shoten, 2005); Shi Wanshun, Liu Shuzin, and Xu Peixian eds., Di guo li de ‘di fang wen hua’: huang min hua shi qi Taiwan wen hua zhuang kuang (Taipei: Bozhongzhe chuban, 2008). 34 For discussion on young women’s groups in the Japanese countryside, see Watanabe Yōko, Kindai Nihon joshi shakai kyōiku seiritsushi (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1997). On education on women in colonial Korea, see Kim Puja, Shokuminchiki Chōsen no kyōiku to jendā (Kanagawa: Seori shobō). On the seinendan for young women in colonial Taiwan, see Miyazaki Seiko, “Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru josei no eijenshī ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu,” Jendā kenkyū 6 (March 2003): 85-108; Miyazaki Seiko, “Taiwan ni okeru joshi no seinendan to shokojin no keiken (1939-45-nen),” Gendai Taiwan kenkyū 39 (March 2011): 62-83.

!13 Finn Stepputat advocate.35 In all three places, young men in the countryside were called national

“pillars” and constituted the majority of military recruits during World War II. Since the rhetoric of Japanese nationalism was common in rural youth mobilization, many scholars have taken it at face value and focused on the degree to which the state accomplished nationalistic indoctrination or identity conversion.36 However, their lives were deeply rooted in village society, and their local contexts shaped their desires and emotions more directly than state policies. In order to understand the mechanism of mobilization, I propose to break the analytical dichotomy between the state and individuals, often overemphasized by concepts such as persuasion, discipline, and resistance. I emphasize the need to account for the social tensions surrounding these youth. I start with a premise that people’s identities are multi-faceted and context specific.37 Youth in the countryside did not live in the binary between national and local identities, or between Japanese and Korean (or Taiwanese) identities. Depending on the situation, they saw themselves as

Japanese, Taiwanese (or Korean), northerner, rural, male, young, and so on. I argue that complex combinations of these self-images motivated the youth into the participation in state mobilization. Youth came to internalize, often earnestly, the nationalistic rhetoric because it helped them achieve other social goals. In short, the perspectives of youth in the countryside show us the diversity of their identities and social relationships. However paradoxical it might appear, such diversity explains their acceptance of the ideology of Japanese nationalism.

35 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat eds, States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 5. 36 They include Caprio on Korea, Leo Ching and Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai on Taiwan. Leo Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, June 2001); Hui- yu Caroline Ts’ai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire Building: An Institutional Approach to Colonial Engineering (New York: Routledge, 2009). 37 I owe this point to constructivist arguments developed in social sciences. See, in particular, Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

!14 Rural villages are important because not only were they intensively mobilized, but also the majority of people lived there—roughly 70% of Japanese, 80% of Taiwanese and Korean lived in the countryside in the 1930s.38 Louise Young claims that urban areas, particularly Tokyo, were the face of modernity, and rural areas became “modernity’s Other.”39 In reality, however popular and powerful urban culture was, cities were the Other for most people in the empire.

This leads us to rethink the implications of colonial modernity as well as urban centrism in the historiography. Historians often turn to the cities, particularly colonial capitals, to find both the attractive and exploitative aspects of colonial modernity. Yet, for the majority of Taiwanese and

Koreans, urban modernity—including mass media, urban landscape, and advanced technology— was a distant image. The Taiwanese and Koreans experienced the cultural hegemony of the empire from the standpoint of rural peripheries. In fact, rural populace lived in their own globalizing moment—the rise of agrarianism—in the early twentieth century. Borrowing such global force, many youth in the countryside attempted to achieve rural modernity—defined fluidly by the denial, transformation, or imitation of urban modernity. Their desire to subvert urban centrism enabled the state to strengthen its rule over remote villages.

In the social history of each place, I use the term “Rural Youth Industry” to describe a social sphere where youth viewed state mobilization as a means to achieve rural modernity. It consisted of young farmers who graduated from elementary school and joined the seinendan and

38 The precise figures differ depending on how one defines “rural” areas. According to the 1930 census, about 49 million (76%) lived in “gun-bu” and 15.4 million (24%) lived in “shi-bu” in 1930. In a different measure, those living in villages and towns under the population size of 20 thousand also constituted 76%. In the same year in Korea, 94.4% lived in “gun-bu” and 5.6% in “fu-bu,” and 81% of working population engaged in agriculture. In Taiwan’s 1930 census, nearly 4.4 million (84%) lived in “gun-bu” and 846 thousand (16%) lived in “shi-bu.” 39 Louise Young, Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern life in Interwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 84.

!15 other youth training programs while remaining in the village. In the Rural Youth Industry, agrarian youth obtained new job opportunities and enhanced their confidence as rural youth vis-

à-vis intellectuals, urban youth, and older generations. In this sphere, Japanese agrarian nationalism resonated among the youth through a shared communicative space, not only in

Japan, but also in Taiwan and Korea. Scholars have argued that the Japanese military founded a popular basis in rural society because it preserved feudal and conservative characters.40 Unlike these scholars, I argue that it was the hope of agrarian youth to subvert social hierarchies, achieve personal success, and become members of a global community—their desire for a rural modernity—that facilitated the spread of nationalistic and militaristic ideology.

Rural modernity was as much imagined as urban modernity was, and the youth’s desire for such modernity reflected the harsh living conditions of the countryside. This does not contradict scholarship that emphasizes the exploitation of rural peasants.41 Still, the exploitative economic structure was not the only relationship the national-imperial state developed with rural populations. Nor was everyday resistance, such as foot-dragging, false compliance, sabotage, and pilfering, which James Scott calls “weapons of the weak,” the only means of exercising power for these youth.42 This dissertation shows that youth lived in complex social relationships, and,

40 See Richard Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). R.P. Dore and Tsutomu Ōuchi, “Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism” in Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, ed. James W. Morley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 181-209. 41 Representative of this view are Japanese historians Asada Kyōji and Higuchi Yūichi and Korean historians Kang Man-gil and Pang Ki-jung. For example, see Asada Kyōji, Nihon shokuminchi kenkyū shiron (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1990); Asada Kyōji, Nihon shihon shugi to jinushisei: kosakusei dainōjō no tenkai kōzō (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 1963); Higuchi Yūichi, Nihon no shokuminchi shihai to Chōsen nōmin (Tokyo: Dōseisha, 2010); Kang Man-gil, Ilche sidae pinmin saenghwalsa yǒn’gu (Seoul: Ch’angjaksa, 1987); Pang Kie-chung and Michael Shin eds., Landlords, Peasants, and Intellectuals in Modern Korea (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2005). 42 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

!16 whenever they could, they saw state and anti-state mobilization as the platform from which to engage with other social challenges.

The concept of the Rural Youth Industry helps reinterpret mobilization from the youth’s point of view and makes the comparison of nation-building among different villages possible.

Measuring and comparing the spread of nationalism is a difficult task. Nationalization is a continuous process, not something that culminates and moves on. The state did not transform all the populations into patriotic Japanese nationals by the end of World War II. The variation across places and people raises a number of questions: If the goal was a nation-empire, how similar were the processes of nation-building at home and colonial rule in Taiwan and Korea? How comparable were Japanese nationalisms expressed by Japanese youth and colonial youth? From where did the difference between Taiwan and Korea come? By comparing the emergence, development, and demise of the Rural Youth Industry in three villages, this dissertation offers some provisional answers. In all cases, local contexts, especially compositions of social hierarchy and geographical locations, defined the development of the Rural Youth Industry.

The Structure of the Dissertation: Villages and Individuals

Rural youth mobilization in the Japanese empire was not only a set of governmental policies and institutions; it was also a social movement. Intellectuals, social reformers, activists of various political camps, and youth participated in the mobilization. Together they created a social imaginary of “rural youth”—healthy, masculine, and hardworking national “pillars.” In

Japan, the concept of “rural youth” and the institution of seinendan grew hand in hand. Chapter 1 discusses how the various interests converged on training of young men in the countryside. The twin development of the seinendan and idea of “rural youth” shows the continuous effort to

!17 nationalize the Japanese countryside as well as tensions hidden underneath. Once the organizations spread in Japan, anti-colonial intellectual youth in Taiwan and Korea viewed the seinendan as a tool for nation-building of their own in the 1910s and 20s before they became an apparatus to spread Japanese nationalism. To fight colonial rule, many turned to socialist and communist support from abroad, leading to ideological splits and complex youth politics in

Taipei and Seoul. Chapter 2 shows that, although anti-colonial youth leaders shared a belief in the importance of mobilizing rural population, the concept of “rural youth” did not help them bridge the ideological differences or the gap between elite youth in the cities and illiterate youth in rural villages.

The problems faced by national leaders already show a divide between the headquarters in urban capitals and local branches. In rural villages, youth viewed mobilization in light of their own social opportunities in their immediate contexts. To examine the gap between national movements and youth’s perspectives, I offer social histories of three villages—Shida village in

Miyagi prefecture in northeast Japan (Chapters 3 and 4), Beipu village in Xinzhu province in northern Taiwan (Chapters 5 and 6), Kwangsǒk village in South Ch’ungch’ǒng province in central South Korea (Chapters 7 and 8). One might wonder how representative of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea these villages are and how comparable they are to one another. I did not aim to find a representative village of each country. Nor did I seek perfect comparability among the three villages beyond the observation that they were equally small and peripheral in national-imperial politics. The primary goal of comparing villages is to challenge the national framework and suggest a new way to dissect the empire. These villages show the diversity of experience within present-day national boundaries as well as patterns across the Japanese empire.

!18 In these chapters, I examine how rural youth mobilization affected the social environments of young people, particularly when and how the Rural Youth Industry emerged in each local context. There is a large pattern in the process across the three villages. The rise of

“rural youth” first served dominant landlords. Youth groups then symbolized the new generation, consolidating a social status of relatively privileged youth in the countryside. With an expansion of state programs on youth training, the Rural Youth Industry emerged for elementary school graduates. Rural youth mobilization during World War II entailed both empowerment and brutality in all places. Obtaining the highest prestige in the colonial volunteer soldier was simultaneously a breakthrough in social opportunities and a vow to kill the enemies of the empire and die for its cause.

At the same time, there are many significant differences. The process unfolded early in

Miyagi (Japan), reaching the peak of youth empowerment at the 1920s and early 1930s. In the colonial villages, the Rural Youth Industry developed in the mid-1930s. Since the Japanese seinendan developed based on pre-Meiji youth associations, youth mobilization concentrated in the remote countryside from the early stage. In the colonies, the center of gravity for youth mobilization shifted from provincial cities and towns to villages in the late 1920s. This was because anti-colonial activists operated in towns and cities before the seinendan and other colonial programs proliferated in remote villages in the 1930s. Youth training institutions were inclusive and mandatory in Japan, but more exclusive and hierarchical in Taiwan and Korea. The scope of youth who took advantage of mobilization differed: Average farm youth in Japan and

Taiwan went to elementary school and joined the seinendan by the 1930s, whereas a smaller number of Korean rural youth could do the same in the 1930s. The Rural Youth Industry in Japan

!19 and Korea collapsed when the majority of youth left home as soldiers, workers, and colonial settlers, physically emptying the Rural Youth Industry in the early 1940s. Taiwanese rural youth also met rapid and large-scale mobilization during wartime, but they were still pursuing opportunities through mobilization when the war ended.

I focus on one or two individuals in each place to discuss what motivated them to participate in rural youth mobilization.43 In Shida, I found personal records of Katō Einojō

(1904-1987) in Ōsaki city hall and conducted interviews with his son. Katō was the eldest son of a landlord, not an example of an average farmer. He kept detailed records of his private youth group called the Aratanome 4-H Club, as well as documents on village administration and wartime mobilization. Personal accounts of average farmers of the 1920s are hard to obtain, but his group journal provides voices of neighborhood farmers. In addition to his accounts, extensive records on youth training facilities housed in the Miyagi Prefecture Archives, the regional newspaper Kahoku shinpō, and a large number of local seinendan newsletters help us picture how the Rural Youth Industry emerged in rural villages in Miyagi.

In Taiwan, I focused on stories of Huang Yuanxing (1925-) and Xu Chongfa (1922-). I obtained their contacts after consulting local historians in Xinzhu province. Huang and Xu belonged to the average class of rural youth who became the main body of the Rural Youth

Industry. After elementary school, both went to a number of youth training programs in the late

1930s and early 1940s. They insisted that we speak in Japanese during the interviews although I spoke with their families in Mandarin Chinese. Xu kept not only his own graduate certificates and personal letters, but preserved many photo albums, newsletters, and student records of the

43 I interviewed a number of people between 70 and 94 years of age in each country, but I decided to focus on a particular generation after realizing there were key years in which the Rural Youth Industry developed.

!20 Xinzhu youth training center, where he worked as an assistant instructor.44 They still regularly get together with friends from youth training, converse with them in Japanese, and sing Japanese songs.

In Korea, I was fortunate enough to locate and interview Kim Yǒng-han (1920-). I first read his extensive interview in Chibang ǔl salda (Living the Local), published by the National

Institute of Korean History.45 Kim grew up as the eldest son of a family in Kwangsǒk village,

South Ch’ungch’ǒng. After elementary school, he participated in youth programs and obtained jobs in local administration as a “model rural youth.” He kept a few photos and records of his youth training and, as a local historian, collected a large number of materials from the colonial period. During our interviews, we constantly switched between Korean and Japanese. On the one hand, he was careful in narrating his involvement in colonial mobilization. He remained in touch with few members of the seinendan partly because many left the region after the Korean War. On the other hand, he emphasized the importance of youth training in formative years of his life. He sang Japanese military songs in public and wrote the lyrics down without my soliciting. He criticized Korean Marxist historians, saying “they don’t know the real situation of the countryside,” showing confidence in his first-hand knowledge of village affairs.

Personal accounts, particularly oral histories, have a risk of inaccuracy and require consideration of how their memories were constructed and narrated. My role as an interviewer— a female Japanese researcher working in an American academic institution—might have

44 Xu Chongfa explained that he collected everything he could find at the Xinzhu youth training center the night before the Guomindang forces confiscated Japanese buildings in 1945 and hid them at home for many years. 45 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda: chibang haengjǒng, 1930 yǒndae esǒ 1950 yǒndae kkaji (Kwach’ang-si: Kuksa p'yǒnch'an wiwonhoe, 2006), 2-220.

!21 influenced what interviewees said and how they phrased it. These individuals escaped fighting in a foreign land, let alone being injured or killed, and that good fortune most likely determined their willingness to talk and their interpretations of colonial youth training. I also assume that postcolonial situations—their relationships with the new rulers and the growth of Taiwanese and

Korean nationalisms—affected their narratives. Both societies experienced democratization in the 1990s; in Korea, accusations against “pro-Japanese collaborators” have arisen, and in

Taiwan, accusations against the Guomindang (Kuomintang) regime have led to a nostalgia of

Japanese rule. I believe these contemporary social and political changes have influenced the narratives of people’s memories. Despite these issues, the interviewees provided vivid pictures of everyday lives in the countryside we would never gain from archival materials. Being able to see their expressions and hear the tone of their voices helped me discern more than I could with colonial official reports and newspapers—these printed sources, too, have issues in accuracy and reflect the intentions of unidentifiable authors. The personal histories of these men show that the affection, grudges, and desires formed in social relationships are important if we want to understand how these people became “model rural youth” and how mass mobilization of the

Japanese empire operated in such intensity and scale. !

!22 ! ! ! ! ! Chapter 1: Making of the “Rural Youth” and the Seinendan in Imperial Japan !

Among the many semi-governmental institutions that Japanese bureaucrats supervised in the pre-World War II era, seinendan (youth associations) were an impressive success. By the

1920s, almost every village had a seinendan, which included almost all eligible young people as members. The national network spread like a cobweb, and county-, prefecture-, and nation-level federations regularly organized sport and training events. The importance of youth education through the seinendan gained wide recognition and even challenged the centrality of academic instruction provided by the school system. Through the political and economic upheavals in the

1930s, the seinendan provided the core human resources for agricultural production, public construction work, and military conscription, as well as the alleged bastion of nationalistic ideology. The more remote the village, the more vital a role the seinendan played in maintaining stability and morale in rural life.

Institutions like the seinendan, locally-grounded and centrally-controlled at the same time, were key to Japan’s nation-building—not only in Japan but also in the “outer territories” like Taiwan, Korea, and Karafuto. By constructing the symbolic image of “rural youth” with the seinendan, state officials attempted to inspire and control young people in the countryside. In

1904-5, officials in Japan found activities of village youth associations useful for mobilization

!23 for the Russo-Japanese War. After World War I, the army pushed the government to standardize them under the uniform name of seinendan. By the late 1910s, the scale of the seinendan reached its height, numbering 18 thousand groups and 2.9 million members, which remained the same until World War II. State bureaucrats established the national headquarters, the Japan Youth Club

[Nihon seinenkan], in Tokyo in 1921. The national network was amalgamated as the Greater

Japan Seinendan Federation in 1924, which absorbed the seinendan federations in Taiwan and

Korea in 1938.1 It was renamed the Greater Japan Seinendan the following year, and was merged with similar national organizations of young women and boys to form the Greater Japan

Seishōnendan in 1941.2 These successive steps toward centralization corresponded to the effort of the state to intensify mass mobilization. The seinendan were designed to discipline the

“impressionable” and “immature” sectors of the population and create ideal Japanese subjects.

Yet, increasing state control over village seinendan was not the only, or even central, reason for the success of seinendan mobilization. It owed to the capacious concept of “rural youth” —healthy, masculine, and patriotic national “pillars” —that absorbed the interests and goals of everyone involved. Different government ministries, such as Home, Education,

Agriculture, and Army, had a stake in youth education in the countryside. Intellectuals and social activists applied ideas of developmental psychology, imperial youth mobilization, and agrarianism to seinendan training programs. Soon the concept of “rural youth” became a fighting tool for young farmers themselves. Based on their identity as “rural youth,” they imagined a new

1 Karafuto was already considered a part of the Greater Japan Seinendan Federation in the survey of 1930. Kumagai Tatsujirō, Dai Nihon Seinendanshi (Tokyo: Nihon Seinenkan, 1942), Appendix 61-67. 2 On these formal changes in institutions, see Kumagai and various other publications by the Japan Youth Club. The seinendan were reduced back to village-centered organizations (although still headed by the Japan Youth Club) after the end of World War II.

!24 community extending beyond the village, and even the nation, and sometimes challenged established authorities.

By embodying the idea of “rural youth,” the seinendan made it possible for various groups to pursue contradictory sets of interests—creating strong soldiers while deemphasizing the presence of the army, keeping young people in the remote countryside while fostering their desire to connect with the global community of modern youth, and teaching them self-discipline while allowing them to rebel against the establishment. It was this multi-dimensionality and flexibility in the ideology and practice of seinendan institutions that produced the nationalistic population in the Japanese countryside.

Yamamoto Takinosuke's Inaka seinen

The modern rural youth group movement in Japan started in the area around Hiroshima.

In 1896, Yamamoto Takinosuke, a 24-year-old schoolteacher, self-published a book entitled

Inaka seinen (Rural Youth).1 Like many of the young male population at the time, Yamamoto had escaped conscription duty, probably because of poor vision.2 Poverty forced him to abandon his dream of either continuing to middle school or going to Tokyo. Instead, he had to count himself lucky to work at a village administrative office and elementary school. Inaka seinen was a lament about the life of youth in the countryside, giving voice to Yamamoto’s growing frustrations during six years of activism aimed at injecting life into local youth groups:

1 For more detail on Yamamoto’s upbringing and activism, see Tani Teruhito, Yamamoto Takinosuke no shōgai to shakai kyōiku (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 2011). 2 Only 20% of the young male population passed the conscription exam during Meiji (1868-1911), and it only increased to 40-50% during the Taisho (1912-1926) and early Showa periods. See Katō Yōko, Chōheisei to kindai Nihon (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1996), 65-67; Okada Yōji, “Seinendan undō no haha, Yamamoto Takinosuke no shōgai to shisō,” in Yamamoto Takinosuke zenshū, Yamamoto Takinosuke (Tokyo: Nihon seinenkan, 1985), 1. Tani, Yamamoto Takinosuke, 22-50.

!25 Although [the youth of the city and the country] are both youth, one kind is embraced warmly and the other is abandoned on the street. The so-called “rural youth” are the ones who have been abandoned. They are without school name or diploma... Despite the fact that they constitute the majority of the youth of the nation, they are neglected and 3 !left out of the discussion. Yamamoto was reacting against what he viewed as a growing attention to youth focused on students in urban areas. The late 1880s and early 1890s saw the burgeoning of commercial magazines targeting urban youth. The scholar Kimura Naoe argues that seinen (youth) became a new category as a counter to sōshi, the mob-like youth who had engaged in violent political demonstrations during the Freedom and Popular Rights movement of the 1880s. The most influential source of the new idea of seinen was the popular journalist Tokutomi Sohō and his magazine, Kokumin no tomo (The Nation's Friend). The magazine was named after the American

The Nation, which Tokutomi read avidly while attending Dōshisha English School in Kyoto.4 In

1887, the magazine featured a series of articles entitled “The Youth of New Japan and the

Politics of New Japan,” which Kimura calls “a manifesto for the magazine.”5 In these articles,

Tokutomi, only 24 years old at the time, assigned a role to (high school and college) students as the engine of a new Japanese politics.6 The voice of Kokumin no tomo echoed around the country and reached far beyond urban intellectuals. Many young men formed associations in cities and provincial towns, ranging from small groups of ten to fifteen to large organizations with

3 Yamamoto Takinosuke, “Inaka seinen,” in Yamamoto Takinosuke zenshū, Yamamoto Takinosuke (Tokyo: Nihon seinenkan, 1985), 1. 4 Yonehara Ken, Tokutomi Sohō (Tokyo, Chūō kōron sinsha: 2003), 61-81. Tokutomi Sohō originally emphasized the importance of the “country gentlemen (inaka shinshi),” but the main audience was those in school in large and local cities. 5 Kimura Naoe, no tanjō: Meiji Nihon ni okeru seijiteki jissen no tankan (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1998), 43. 6 “Shin Nihon no seinen oyobi shin nihon no seiji,” Kokumin no tomo 6-9 (July—October, 1887).

!26 thousands of members. They produced youth magazines, many imitating the design, format, and language of Kokumin no tomo.7

Yamamoto Takinosuke was one of many inspired by the new discourse on seinen. Less than a decade later when Yamamoto wrote Inaka seinen, however, the widening gap in status between urban and rural youth made this discourse appear hypocritical: “Most of the so-called youth magazines published in the cities have no argument, use beautiful and well-crafted language, and yet do not convey sincerity or inspiration,” Yamamoto complained. “They use the phrase ‘for the sake of the youth of the whole nation,’ but only consider their [urban] consumers... no one is really passionate about inspiring the youth in the countryside.”8

Despite his frustration, for Yamamoto, “youth” was a generational category and identity that transcended the social divide between urban and rural. He called on the reader neither to detest nor fear urban youth. The real cleavage he perceived was the one between the young,

“progressive reformers by nature,” and the old (rōbutsu, literally “old things”), who were backward, conservative, corrupt, and indecisive.9 In order to fulfill their responsibility together with urban youth, rural youth were in need of reform and guidance. In his eyes, they lacked a national consciousness and were “wasteful, lazy, weak, sly, obscene, servile, undetermined, reckless, and irresponsible,” though he thought that the social circumstances of farming villages had made them that way.10 Yamamoto advocated reorganizing traditional hamlet youth groups, which had existed for a few centuries but had lost their ability to educate and train the rural

7 Kimura, no tanjō, 131-205. 8 Yamamoto, “Inaka seinen,” 3. 9 Ibid., 6, 9. 10 Ibid.,17.

!27 youth.11 Simple but concrete guidelines—rising early, climbing mountains, taking cold baths, wearing only cotton clothes, reading newspapers, avoiding early marriage—would bring new life to rural youth.

Agrarian Nationalism

Yamamoto’s activism is usually considered the starting point of a nation-wide movement to revive old hamlet youth groups and transform them into the modern seinendan. But the seinendan gained wide support and grew rapidly over the next half a century because the idea of strong rural youth was crucial for many forces in Japan’s modernizing society. One such force was agrarian nationalism. Although the origin of anti-urban pastoralism can be traced to earlier eras, rapid modernization and industrialization during the Meiji period (1868-1912) raised widespread concerns about social changes, which led bureaucrats, urban intellectuals, agronomists, and landlords to develop various strains of agrarianism, or “nōhonshugi.” They believed that urban culture and industrial capitalism corroded national spirit, that agriculture was the basis for prosperous and harmonious nation, and that the purity of the nation was preserved in the countryside.12 One of the most influential agrarianists, Yokoi Tokiyoshi, a professor at

Tokyo Agricultural College, emphasized the moral, ethical, and physical strength of farmers. He argued:

11 Yamamoto’s understanding of pre-Meiji youth groups is not based on historical studies. But throughout Japan, rural hamlets were organized into age and gender groups and a set function was assigned to each group. Youth groups for male residents (sometimes called “wakashū gumi” or “wakamono gumi”) usually took in charge of labor sharing, seasonal festivals, and various supportive roles to household heads. See Tani Teruhito, Wakamono nakama no rekishi (Tokyo: Nihon seinenkan, 1984) on the pre-Meiji youth groups. 12 Various scholars have discussed Japanese agrarianism in more detail. See Thomas Havens, Farm and Nation in Modern Japan: Agrarian Nationalism 1870-1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974); Stephen Vlastos, “Agrarianism Without Tradition: The Radical Critique of Prewar Japanese Modernity,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 74-94; Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 178-204; Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 94-113, for example.

!28 In my opinion the vitality of a country is fostered by its middle-class families; it is particularly well developed among farm families. Such qualities as innocence, sincerity, obedience, vigor, fortitude, trustworthiness, earnestness, and robust health are appropriate for solders and for defending the country. Don’t farmers excel in these qualities above all? Although you cannot make a country out of land alone, the country must not become separated from the soil. Therefore the farmers, who have the closest 13 !connection with the land, love it the most and thus love the country the most. Already apparent in this passage from 1897 was the belief that farmers were the basis of the nation’s military strength. Yokoi even argued that the Way of the Farmer was the heir to

Bushidō, the Way of Warrior.14 Army officials had already identified the simple way of life in the countryside as more desirable than the cities for preparing healthy and obedient soldiers. Yokoi’s agrarianism corroborated their belief. Although not all agrarianists agreed with Yokoi, as the army grew confident in its power to influence domestic and international spheres after victories in international wars in 1895 against Qing China, 1905 against Russia, and 1915 against

Germany in China, agrarianists and army officials increasingly shared common interests and goals. By the early 1930s, when Japan launched an all-out war on the Chinese continent and established the puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China, agrarianism provided the rhetoric that appealed to Japanese farmers to support imperial expansion. Katō Kanji, the main proponent of agricultural migration to Manchuria, argued in 1936:

Nothing is more important than hardening the spirit of Japan, the spirit of Yamato. Accordingly, precisely by taking charge of agriculture as Japanese and devoting themselves to increasing the prosperity of the country, the true farmers living in this faith will for the first time be able to become imperial farmers. For this reason the farmers must for a time spring up, lay aside their sickles, and take up swords. The unity of agriculture and the military is a natural thing. The true farm spirit is the sprit of Yamato.15

13 Yokoi Tokiyoshi, “Nōhonshugi,” (October 1897), 232, trans. and quoted in Havens, Farm and Nation, 101. 14 Havens, Farm and Nation, 104; Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 180. 15 Katō Kanji, “Kōkoku nōmin no jikaku to shimei” (1936), trans. and quoted in Havens. Farm and Nation, 292.

!29 ! Other agrarian ideologues criticized this alliance between agrarian and militaristic goals.

Yet they also envisioned communalism and collectivism in farm villages—the values emphasized by army leaders—as a powerful antidote to the poisons of urban corruption and moral decay.16 Yanagita Kunio, the founder of modern Japanese ethnology, while criticizing

Yokoi as an extremist, also viewed the countryside as the repository of Japan’s native culture.

Yanagita, then a bureaucrat of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, was alarmed by the widening gap between urban and rural society in terms of material development. His agrarian romanticism grew stronger as he went on a “pilgrimage” of rural villages and began to write more as a folklorist. Popular Meiji novelists also romanticized rustic life and waxed poetic about the superiority of farming villages over cities. Tokutomi Roka, Miyazaki Koshoshi, and Kunikida

Doppo exalted the pure and moral life of rural society in opposition to the emptiness of urban life. “Freedom is found in the mountains and forests,” Kunikida Doppo wrote in 1897.17 The folkloric turn and pastoral romanticism in Meiji fiction—both the products mostly of urban intellectuals—contributed to the deepening stream of agrarianism in imperial Japan.

Yamamoto Takinosuke’s Inaka seinen reflected both an embrace of agrarianism and a critique of pastoral romantics. For him, the discourse of a morally superior countryside had done little to boost the self-confidence of rural population. Yamamoto described the mindset of villagers that detested everything “rural”:

The worship of cities among country people has remained unchanged now and in the past... People consider it the greatest shame to be called “country bumpkins (inaka

16 This was, of course, similar to many examples around the world. See Irvin Scheiner, “The Japanese Village Imagined, Real, Contested,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. by Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 67-78. 17 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 182. See also, 178-186.

!30 mono);” they have changed the name from inaka (countryside) to chihō (local) without notice, and avoid uttering the word inaka... When discussing the budget for education of a village I know, some argued that, in determining qualifications of elementary school teachers, since local teachers do not have correct pronunciation, we should abolish [the recruitment of local people] and recruit teachers from Tokyo. Our language in the countryside has been gradually corroded by shallow urban language—no inaka 18 !language, no inaka morals, and in the end they even deny being inaka. The feeling of being left behind was exacerbated by the extreme poverty of many rural areas. Owing to the new tax system, effects of the monetary economy and the deflation of the

1880s, tenancy increased from about 27% of arable land in 1868 to 45% in 1908.19 Famine repeatedly struck Japan's northern regions, where poverty was widespread.20 Although conditions in Hiroshima, where Yamamoto lived and wrote, were not as severe as those in northern Japan, the nation-wide deflation in the 1880s had already forced many small farmers to sell their land and revert to tenancy.21 The poverty of farming villages alarmed the government, especially after the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-5 drained national resources. In addition to measures taken by the Agriculture and Commerce Ministry, the powerful Home Ministry launched the Local

Improvement Movement (1906-1918) and implemented a number of programs to raise agricultural productivity and farmers’ morale. Agrarianism, in the form that promoted diligence and discipline of farmers, was invoked every time Japan faced a rural crisis throughout the decades before 1945.

18 Yamamoto, “Inaka seinen,” 9. 19 Ann Waswo, “The Transformation of Rural Society 1900-1905,” in The Cambridge History Of Japan Volume 6 The Twentieth Century, ed. by Peter Duus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 543. 20 During Meiji, villages in Tōhoku had very low crop yields in 1869, 1875, 1876, 1879, 1886 1888, 1889, 1890, 1902, 1905, 1910, 1913, and 1914. Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi (Miyagi: Shida son, 1950), 143-154. 21 Okada, “Seinendan undō no haha,” 2.

!31 Insofar as the seinendan became an icon of imperial masculinity and the carrier of agrarian ideals, they were a part of a larger global trend hailing the exposure of youth to nature.

In the view of agrarian ideologues, whether militant or anti-militant, the seinendan embodied

Japanese national spirit that could only be nurtured by engaging with soil, water, and the rural environment. The seinendan were a symbol of rural imperial stocks that stood against the

“decaying national soul” represented by urban consumer culture of the 1920s and 30s, with its jazz, cafes, and “modern girls.” The feminizing effect of urban culture on young men was a globally observed phenomenon. Robert Baden-Powell established the British Boy Scouts in 1907 as a response to “the weak, stunted, over-excited, and too often diseased” slum children in urban cities.22 Baden-Powell and other educators believed that the exposure to fresh air and nature would transform these urban youth. Other youth groups around the world in the early twentieth century, such as the German Wandervogel and the American 4-H Club, implemented similar programs, linking agrarian ideals to new educational theories. The seinendan not only responded to this trend, but put its agrarian ideals into practice even more intensively than their counterparts. This was because, unlike Europe, the members were themselves rural residents who constituted the main labor force in agricultural production.

Moral Suasion, Moral Training, and Social Education

Agrarianists held various opinions regarding the role of army and state officials in fostering harmonious rural communities. All their lectures to seinendan members, however, came to the same conclusion: you must work hard, and hard work is sacred. Yanagita Kunio argued retrospectively in 1930 that “what brightened the future of new Japan [in Meiji and

22 Robert MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement 1890-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 4.

!32 Taishō (1912-1926)] was the development of the seinendan,” and that their foremost strength was their work ethic. “They demonstrated robust and pleasant labor for road repairs, tree planting, or rescue operations. The pleasure of engaging in collective labor with a cheerful mind was a healthy interest and stimulation for the members as well.”23 The “hardwork- ism” [kinrōshugi] defined seinendan activities and was re-interpreted many times during cycles of economic and wartime mobilization in the first half of the twentieth century.

Hardwork-ism became the core principle of the seinendan mainly through the activities of the Hōtokukai (Society of Repaying Virtue). The Hōtokukai began as local organizations to implement the teachings of Ninomiya Sontoku (1787-1856), a philosopher and practitioner of agrarian morality, in the late nineteenth century. His followers preached honesty, diligence, communal values, and most importantly, the harmony between moral and economic incentives by emphasizing the virtue of labor. State officials, particularly those in the Home Ministry, enthusiastically supported the establishment of Hōtokukai groups in 1905, the same year that the seinendan became a national movement. The Hōtokukai quickly spread through the nation to the extent that, in 1911, there was reportedly no local area that did not have a Hōtokukai branch.24

The Hōtokukai were a twin of the seinendan that translated an abstract agrarianism into a set of disciplining measures not only for the youth groups, but also for elementary schools and village administrators to adopt.

Discipline provided by the Hōtokukai was useful, particularly from state officials’ point of view, in promoting governmental moral suasion [kyōka] campaigns. Originally a Buddhist

23 Yanagita Kunio, Meiji Taishōshi: sesōhen (1930, repr., Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1962), 301-302. 24 Isono Shōzō, “Shakai kyōiku no seiritsu to sono honshitsu no kansuru ichi kōsatsu, ni,” Kyōikugaku kenkyū 24 no. 6 (December 1957): 29-30.

!33 term, kyōka for Meiji Japan meant ideological education to create diligent and loyal subjects dedicated to the cause of the nation.25 In the Local Improvement Movement, local officials and leaders conducted various moral suasion campaigns in both urban and rural communities.26 Its ideological principles were written in the Boshin Imperial Rescript (1908): Emperor-centered nationalism, hardwork-ism, and the spirit of frugality. Through kyōka campaigns, these values— or “the state’s prose and propaganda”—became familiar rhetoric in people’s everyday lives.27

The Hōtokukai took charge of designing many kyōka campaigns, and regarded the seinendan as the engine of kyōka in rural villages.

In order to turn young farmers into reliable pillars of Hōtokukai-led kyōka programs, seinendan leaders and schoolteachers conducted shūyō (moral training, self-cultivation). As an umbrella term for non-academic youth education, shūyō usually meant reading and listening to tales of “the spirit of sacrifice, beautiful morals of obedience, good customs of simplicity and thrift, and an ethic of discipline and moderation.”28 Through shūyō, seinendan members were supposed to understand the importance of agriculture and find passion in improving the conditions of rural villages. Shūyō was also considered a counter-measure to mass youth migration to big cities, a grave concern for officials and agrarian activists alike. The term, “city

25 Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7. 26 Many scholars in Japan have discussed the policies and their implementation of the Local Improvement Movement. For example, Miyachi Masato, Nichi-Ro sensōgo seijishi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai, 1973), 1-127. Kasama Kenji, Chihō kairyōki ni okeru shōgakkō to chiiki shakai (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2003). 27 The term is from Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat eds. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 5. 28 Maeda Ujirō, Chihō seinen no tebiki (Tokyo: Taiseikai Shuppanbu, 1912), 84-85.

!34 fever,” was evoked by seinendan advocates because of the way in which urban life changed the body and personality of the migrant:

Those who migrate to cities soon experience a deterioration of their health... Moreover, those who have already acquired the taste for urban life do not return to the village no matter how difficult their lives are, and even if they move back, there is little possibility 29 !that they will become good farmers. By internalizing Hōtoku discipline through shūyō, seinendan members were expected to remain in the countryside and shoulder kyōka campaigns in the village.

In the 1920s and 30s, kyōka campaigns and shūyō programs further expanded under the name of “social education”—a term coined by state officials in the Ministry of Education in 1920 in order to promote education among working teenagers.30 Officials had recognized the need for academic guidance outside school since the Russo-Japanese War. A survey of the academic achievements of elementary school students in 1905 Tokyo showed how quickly their abilities deteriorated after they graduated from school and how low their success rate in the conscription exam had fallen.31 In the 1920s, facing increasing political activism by socialist and communist leaders, widespread tenant disputes, and heightening labor movements, the Ministry of Education set up a bureau of “social education” (1924) to expand the education of working teenagers outside school. The Ministry launched a program called “Kyōka Total Mobilization” in 1929 to take a stronger state initiative in kyōka campaigns rather than leaving them to activists and semi- private entities.32

29 Ryōminsha, ed., Chihō seinen no jikaku (Tokyo: Rakuyūdō, 1911), 9. Similar argument in Maeda, Chihō seinen, 11-14. 30 Ogawa Toshio and Hashiguchi Kiku, “Shakai kyōiku no seiritsu to sono honshitsu no kansuru ichi kōsatsu, ichi,” Kyōikugaku kenkyū 24 no.4 (August 1957): 6-18. 31 Kasama, Chihō kairyōki, 113-115. 32 Ogawa and Hashiguchi, “Shakai kyōiku no seiritsu,” 6-18.

!35 The emphasis on “social education” reflected a conscious effort by state officials to engage with an increasingly complex “society.” Norisugi Yoshihisa, an education official who founded the social education administration, theorized about “society” and the purpose of social education in many of his writings. “A critical discovery in modern scholarship, an equivalent of the discovery of a new continent by Columbus, is that of the fact and concept of ‘society,’” he argued. He considered it miraculous that social education became part of the Ministry’s work in

1920 because “until several years [before], government authorities did not have a good feeling about the word ‘society’ itself.” For him, society was “an organic group consisting of people who share a collective purpose.” Social education aimed at helping individuals acquire qualities to be good members of society, including the spirit of social cooperation, public service, and self- reliance.33 In effect, social education was continuation of previous kyōka campaigns and shūyō programs in a more institutionalized fashion, and both these terms remained central in social education. Norisugi and other education officials continued to regard the seinendan as a central institution of social education. They viewed the deep roots of youth groups in village societies as best suited to the goal of transforming the members and villagers into modern social and national citizens.

The Influence of the Military and Taishō Democracy

The rising importance of the concept of “society,” as reflected in the term “social education,” revealed how the role of the state vis-à-vis its people was changing in the 1920s. The social sphere expanded and challenged bureaucracy, particularly in the form of contentious politics—rivalry between political parties, tenancy and labor disputes, heightening socialist and

33 Matsuda Takeo, “Norisugi Yoshihisa no shakai kyōiku ron no keisei to sono tokushitsu,” in Gendai Nihon shakai kyōikushi ron, ed. Shinkai Hideyuki (Tokyo: Gakujutsu shuppankai, 2002), 56-59.

!36 communist activities—of the period of “Taishō Democracy.” Intellectuals and liberal activists criticized the steady development of the influence of the military over politics and society during this period. The seinendan played a unique role in this milieu. Born out of Japan’s wars against

China and Russia, the seinendan were the key institution between the army and the rural population. At the same time, village seinendan members saw their groups as a means to participate in contentious politics. Because of this apparent dual characteristic of the seinendan

—shouldering the army’s goals and bringing democratic activism to the grassroots level—, historians’ evaluations of the role of the seinendan are also divided. Scholars such as Ōe Shinobu and Richard Smethurst consider the spread of the seinendan as an indicator of rising militarism, while others, including Kanō Masanao, Ōkado Masakatsu, and Ōgushi Ryūkichi, see it as a sign of growing democracy.34

The army’s involvement is central in the development of the seinendan. An important

Meiji leader, Yamagata Aritomo, believed in the socialization effect of military training and set up the army conscription system in 1873. Yamagata’s protégé and future Army Minister and

Prime Minister, Tanaka Giichi, established the army reservist associations (zaigō gunjinkai), tying together former conscripts throughout the country in 1907. These leaders viewed the army as “the final national school” that teaches loyalty, discipline, and patriotism among the population.35 World War I prompted Tanaka Giichi, then the chief of Administration Bureau of

34 Richard Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Ōe Shinobu, Kokumin kyōiku to guntai (Tokyo: Shin Nippon shuppansha, 1974). Also see Kubo Yoshizō, Nihon fashizumu kyōiku seisakushi (Tokyo: Meiji tosho, 1969); Kanō Masanao, Taishō demokurashī no teiryū (Tokyo: Nihon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1973), 95-154; Ōgushi Ryūkichi, “Seinendan jishuka undō no ayumi,” Gekkan shakai kyōiku (March 1989): 88-95; Ōkado Masakatsu, “Meibōka chitsujo no henbō” in Gendai shakai eno tenkei, eds. Sakano Hiroshi et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993), 65-108. 35 Smethurst, A Social Basis, 1-21.

!37 the Army Ministry, to strengthen and centralize the seinendan. Tanaka studied the mobilization of various youth groups while touring in Europe during the Great War, and was convinced that a firm grip on youth was of critical importance if the nation were to avoid a major ideological upheaval at a time of war. He energetically promoted this view in writing, including his 1915 book, Social National Education:

Youth education is not just an issue of pedagogy, but that of national survival. On this large point, all nations share the same conclusion. Therefore, people in every nation realized that youth, shouldering the future of the nation, have to be guided with special purpose and caution that does not overly emphasize academic or physical education. It is a trend to believe that this is most needed in order to develop the nation. At the same time, all nations also share the conclusion that guiding them appropriately strengthens 36 !national defense. The strength of German troops, in particular, left a deep impression on Tanaka and other government leaders despite their eventual defeat in World War I and Japan’s confrontation with them in China. Norisugi Yoshihisa was in awe of the degree of mobilization of students and youth in Germany: “In the prewar period, there were 60,346 college students [in Germany], of which 38,400 went to war, which amounts to 64%. Moreover, most of these students volunteered to join the military.” In contrast, in Japan during the wars of 1894 and 1904, “college students who volunteered to fight were extremely few.” In Germany, even elementary school students became “soldiers fighting in the farming fields.” Norisugi quoted a German slogan, “the ridges of the farming fields are your trench, the potatoes that you plant are your supply, the weeds in the fields are your enemies to defeat, and we are German soldiers knowing no fatigue!”37 Officials such as Tanaka and Norisugi envisioned that the network of seinendan, along with the army

36 Tanaka Giichi, Shakaiteki kokumin kyōiku (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1915), 88. 37 Norisugi Yoshihisa, “Senji ni okeru Doitsu seinen o ronjite wagakuni no seinen ni oyobu,” Miyagi kyōiku 235 (March 1917): 16-20.

!38 reservist associations, would similarly ensure national sentiment and produce healthy soldiers in the countryside.38 This belief was strengthened in the face of radicalizing leftist activism among urban college students in the 1920s.39

The army’s active involvement in youth education did not stop at the seinendan and reservist associations. Ugaki Kazushige, who succeeded the position of the Army Minister after

Tanaka Giichi, established youth training centers [seinen kunrenjo] in 1926. Attached to elementary schools, youth training centers targeted working male youth between the ages of 16 and 20. In close collaboration with the village seinendan, they provided 800 hours of instruction in academic subjects, vocational training, and military drills. They were considered a part of expanding “social education” and put a strong emphasis on self-cultivation [shūyō]. Although enrollment was not mandatory, the army encouraged farm youth to participate by allowing shorter conscription terms for the graduates. Touting agrarian nationalism as a core principle, youth training centers, like the seinendan, spread in the countryside. Both their goal of

“improving youth’s qualities as superior national and public subjects” and their methods of agricultural and military training showcased the fusion of agrarianism, military goals, and social education.40 While youth training centers turned into more comprehensive youth schools in the

1930s, the idea of governmental youth education traveled to colonial Korea through Ugaki. As the Governor-General in Korea from 1931, he launched an agrarian campaign with a strong

38 Kawai Yorio, Tanaka Giichi den (Tokyo: Tanaka Giichi den hensansho, 1929), 306; Tanaka Giichi, Ōshū taisen no kyōkun to seinen shidō (Tokyo: Shingetsusha, 1918). See Hirayama Kazuhiko, Seinen shūdanshi kenkyū josetsu II (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1978), 21-30 for Tanaka Giichi's intervention into seinendan policies. See also Smethurst, 1-49. 39 On government officials’ reactions against student activism, see Kubo, Nihon fashizumu kyōiku, 165-183. 40 Monbushō futsū gakumu-kyoku, ed., Seinen kunren gikai. (Tokyo: Shakai kyōiku kyōkai, 1926).

!39 emphasis on rural youth training, including the establishment of village youth associations and youth training centers.

The extension of the army’s influence over youth education in the name of shūyō alarmed many politicians and seinendan advocates. The 1915 decree on the seinendan, issued after

Tanaka Giichi’s powerful lobbying, stirred controversy because it limited the membership of seinendan to those between ages 12 and 20. Despite the fact that the decree defined the seinendan strictly as an institution of moral training to spread patriotism, to many people the age limit signaled a link to conscription. In the National Diet, a Seiyūkai politician Hikita Eikichi harshly criticized the army’s intention: “I cannot help but oppose the attempt to put more than

30,000 youth associations in Japan under control of military officers.” He argued that, in reality, the village seinendan often included those between 20-40 years of age, or even above 50, so the age standardization would destroy these groups.41

In the face of such criticism, army leaders tried to tone down their interest in youth education and emphasized the development of physical strength of young citizens instead.

Tanaka Giichi himself argued, though not convincingly, that preparatory military training would potentially harm the army (because youth might lose earnestness by the time they served the army) so youth education should focus instead on enjoyable physical exercise and the building of bodily strength.42 Army officials constantly denied the military ethos in youth training centers.

Nagata Tetsuzan, an army officer who had written a famous report on the prospect of all-out war mobilization in 1920, for instance, argued that youth training centers “were not born out of a

41 Hirayama, Seinen shūdanshi, 21-30. “Dai-37 teikoku gikai shūgiin giji sokkiroku dai-7 gō,” 88, quoted in Hirayama 29. 42 Tanaka Giichi, Shakaiteki kokumin kyōiku, 117-132.

!40 stupid idea to turn people into incomplete soldiers through incomplete military education,” but rather “to prepare youth with robust bodies and mentalities instead of teaching them battle techniques in peace time, and to send those of best quality to the military camp and educate them according to the needs of the time.”43

Other advocates of the seinendan attempted to establish an image of the seinendan as disassociated from the army. One successful form of public advertisement was the construction of the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo by seinendan members. Tazawa Yoshiharu, a top official in the

Home Ministry later called the “father of seinendan,” organized this project between 1919 and

1923. A total of 16,443 volunteer youth traveled from seven prefectures, camped outdoors, cooked for themselves, and engaged in strenuous construction labor for 10-15 days at a time. The construction was more dangerous and tougher than the volunteers originally imagined. Many were injured or became sick during their service and barely endured the harsh working and living conditions. Despite that, for Tazawa and top leaders, this project not only provided free construction labor to the government, but also “spiritually linked the Meiji Shrine to the seinendan.”44 The Meiji Shrine symbolized the direct and deep connection between the Emperor and “rural youth” and increased its importance during World War II. Even village youth in the colonies learned about the construction project as a model case of youth’s hardwork-ism, and the

Shrine became one of the most popular sites to visit during their study trips to Japan.45 Through this project, as well as sports festivals and other events held at the Meiji Shrine Stadium, the seinendan emphasized their link to the imperial household—a presumably safer kind of

43 Nagata Tetsuzan, Kokka sōdōin no igi (Tokyo: Aoyama Shoten, 1926), 190-193. 44 Hirayama, Seinen shūdanshi, 73-77. 45 Based on interviews with Xu Chongfa in Hengshan, Xinzhu province, on May 20 and 27, 2011.

!41 patriotism than militarism. Historian Hirayama Kazuhiko argues that it had an effect of concealing the military’s involvement in youth programs under the surface of the Emperor- centered nationalism.46

In addition to these efforts, some policy changes were also made to respond to public concerns about the influence of the military on seinendan. The 1920 government decree on the seinendan emphasized the “autonomy” of seinendan members and changed the upper age limit to 25. “People-centered and people-based [minshu minpon] ideologies—or the so-called ideologies of democracy” triggered this change, Moriya Eifu, another official of the Home

Ministry involved in the seinendan centralization, later explained.47 In fact, this decree marked the beginning of a new phase called the “autonomy movement” in the institutional history of seinendan. Although the army did not loosen its grip over rural youth, the rise of socialist and communist activism made many youth aware of their political leverage against administrative authorities. Some seinendan groups, most famously those in Nagano prefecture, sought more independence for young people and local branches from the bureaucratic national network, and others attempted to increase youth’s responsibility within the given institutional framework.

Popularity of the Seinendan in the “Success” Paradigm

It is hard to know, and impossible to generalize, how young people in the countryside viewed the heightening ideological and political interests—agrarian nationalism, moral education and training, military needs, and leftist activism—that converged in the village seinendan. But one observable fact is that the number of youth groups skyrocketed after 1905. Maeda Ujirō

46 Hirayama, Seinen shūdanshi, 82. 47 Quoted in Hirayama, Seinen shūdanshi, 30.

!42 observed that youth groups increased by about 1,000 every year and numbered more than 7,000 by 1912.48 In 1918, the Ministry of Education recorded the total number of seinendan as 18,482, with their members reaching almost 2.9 million.49

The rapidity and scale of the expansion of seinendan cannot be explained merely by the fact that the army and state officials encouraged the formation of seinendan groups. Another catalyst was the widespread excitement about Japan’s hard-won victory against Russia in 1905.

The exhilaration all over the country pressured youth to pass the conscription exam. Joining local seinendan and attending their study sessions raised the chance of becoming successful conscripts. The rapid rise in the number of seinendan groups was also a sign of their continuity from pre-Meiji hamlet youth groups. Although Yamamoto Takinosuke argued that traditional youth groups no longer functioned, they were still the most important governing institutions in rural hamlets. In fact, the Meiji government initially banned the traditional hamlet youth groups because they appeared too autonomous, taking charge of community policing, village festivals, fire control, and sometimes engaging in violent mob-like political acts. These hamlet-based youth groups did not suddenly disappear, but changed their names and adjusted their activities in accordance with the new policies of the Meiji state.50 Soon the long tradition of youth groups

48 Maeda, Chihō seinen, 190. 49 Monbushō futsū gakumu-kyoku, Zenkoku seinendan no jissai (Tokyo: Minbushō, 1921), 32. 50 See Tani Teruhito, Wakamono nakama no rekishi on the pre-Meiji youth groups. Onizuka Hiroshi, “Seinen shūdan ni miru chiiki shakai no tōsei to minshū niyoru sono juyō no katei,” Rekishigaku kenkyū 669 (March 1995): 19-36 examines the transition from the traditional youth group to a modern one in Shimoina village, Nagano.

!43 itself became a proof of legitimacy and strength of the seinendan, serving as part of the nation’s invented traditions.51

On the surface, seinendan groups that formed in the countryside appeared to share a uniform set of activities and purposes. They typically consisted of elementary school graduates and were headed by schoolteachers. Around 1910, the Ministry of Education started to gather information on various youth group activities and published lists of “model seinendan.” Its

“Report on Conditions of Youth Groups in Western Prefectures” (1910) argued that all of the 56 selected groups had similar programs: study sessions, monthly meetings, competitive production of agricultural goods, physical exercise, and improvement of public morals.52 Other lists of

“model seinendan” also gave standard goals: study sessions aimed at improving the success rate at the conscription examination and regular meetings intended to improve communal spirit.53

These national surveys, however, failed to register the popularity of one particular activity promoted by the seinendan: night study groups, or yagakkai. Gunma prefecture alone, where the total population was less than one million, counted 11,061 night study groups in

1909.54 A booklet of night study group regulations from Shinjō in Akita prefecture from the same year, written with brush and ink, provides a glimpse of its goals and study plan. A new form of the Shinjō seinendan, this night study group unanimously agreed to impose mandatory

51 For example, the official history of Greater Japan Seinendan, compiled in 1942, emphasized that youth groups in Japan uniquely enjoyed a long tradition at least since the Kamakura period. Kumagai Tatsujirō, Dai Nihon seinendanshi (Tokyo: Nihon seinenkan, 1942), 3. See S. Vlastos ed., Mirror of Modernity on invented traditions in Japan. 52 Monbushō, Kansai shokenka seinenkai jōkyō torishirabesho (Tokyo: Monbushō, 1910). 53 See Hiroshima-ken, Hiroshima-kenka seinen dantai jōkyō torishirabesho (Hiroshima: Hiroshima-ken naimu-bu, 1910); Matsuo Kōzaburō, Mohan seinendan no soshiki to shisetsu (Tokyo: Kaihatsusha, 1911). 54 Gunma-ken, Gunma-ken seinen yagakkai jōkyō shirabe (Maebashi: Gunma-ken naimu-bu, 1909); Gunma-ken, Gunma-ken tōkeisho 1911-1925 (Maebashi: Gunma-ken, 1926), Part III: Population and Others, 9.

!44 participation for all male residents under 20 years of age in the village. It had two teachers: one was responsible for teaching classical Chinese texts and composition, and the other taught arithmetic. Twelve organizing members took responsibility for management, and another 21 members co-signed the new regulations. The study group functioned almost as a regular school, except that it adjusted its hours to the farmers' schedule. The teachers offered 48 hours of classes per month, dividing students into three levels: preparatory, regular first-year, and regular second- year. The regulations required members to take graduation exams and expelled them if they missed classes more than three times a year. Members had to pay a form of tuition every month, consisting of either a batch of homespun straw rope or six pairs of straw sandals.55

None of the standard reasons given in the national surveys to explain youth group activity appeared in these night study group regulations—no mentioning of conscription or public morals

—although the age limit matching the conscription age corresponded to the military’s need. The

Shinjō night study group’s goal was phrased in larger terms: to catch up with the trends of the time and be ready for Japan’s new exposure to international society. The section outlining its purpose argued, “now together with the post [Russo-Japanese] war development, the need for learning is even more evident. Despite that, what is this condition in which we still cling to the obsolete system?”56 Transforming the entire group into a study group was a way to bring modernity to the village. For youth in Shinjō, the goals that government officials envisioned, such as improving the conscription rate and abandoning old customs, were means to the end of achieving rural modernity. They considered the key to modernity lay in opportunities to learn.

55 Shinjō yagakkai, “Seinen yagaku kaisoku” (1909) archived in Seinendanpō Ākaibusu, Tsuruga College. 56 Ibid.

!45 Education defined success in Meiji society, which drove many rural youth to migrate to the cities in the first place. The youth studied classical Chinese texts, which national leaders considered an antiquated body of knowledge. Despite such gaps in their conceptualization of what constituted

“modern,” the night study group provided a possibility—no matter how slight it might have been

—to pursue an alternative path of education for those who did not have means or time to continue attending school.

The aspiration to succeed remained the main source of energy for many seinendan groups in the 1920s. Youth in the countryside criticized the prevalent ‘city fever’ because the “real road to success” was hard work, not formal schooling. “I would like to say to youth who study by themselves [without going to school] —Never despair, carry out your original goal!” One town’s seinendan newsletter in Akita quoted the politician Nagai Ryūtarō, who pointed to the biographies of such well-known figures as Lenin, James MacDonald, and Mussolini as evidence that youth could become powerful politicians by working hard, even if they could not attain a formal higher education.57 Rural youth wrote many essays that called for patience and diligence.

Titles such as “A Youth's Roar: Life is Effort” and “Success Comes from Hard Work” appeared in almost every issue of their newsletters.58

Rural youth re-imagined “risshin shusse” (“rising in the world”), a phrase often used to describe mobility pursued through education and positions in bureaucracy in the cities, as their own paths as modern farmers and villagers. Scholars have discussed how devotion to moral training [shūyō] in the discourses of mass magazines made the goal of ‘risshin shusse’ accessible

57 “Gendai seinen yo!” Yamane seishi kaihō 30 (July 1, 1927): 1-2. 58 “Aru seinen no otakebi jinsei wa doryoku,” Yamane seishi kaihō 32 (September 1, 1927): 1-2. Nakano sei “Seikō wa doryoku kara,” Yamane seishi kaihō 33 (October 1, 1927): 1-2.

!46 to middle-class men, as well as women. Maeda Ai, for example, labeled shūyō the “love child” of risshin shusse.59 Magazine writers and readers attached complex meanings to the word shūyō so it would allow them to challenge the monopoly of success by upper-class men who had access to higher education.60 Young farmers in the countryside created their own shūyō discourse within the popular “success” paradigm, where individuals’ morality and success were interlinked with the nation’s prosperity.

Career success while living in rural villages did not remain a fantasy in the discursive realm. There were real models of farming youth climbing a social hierarchy traditionally determined by family pedigree or wealth. Military service was one of the main sources of new opportunities. Conscripts acquired a more complete education in writing and reading and gained, for example, training in advanced techniques of surveying and map reading. For many young men the army offered opportunities for promotions based on their abilities, which often gave them a greater sense of self-achievement than a patriotic sense of serving the nation. Moreover, soldiers who went abroad to fight in northern China or were stationed in Taiwan and Korea were treated as cosmopolitan figures in the village. Their achievements while in service helped returned soldiers attain positions in local offices and other institutions. Agricultural schools that mid-level farmers could send their sons to also expanded during the course of the 1920s. The graduates of these schools rose in the social hierarchy as agricultural experts and teachers.61

These model figures showed young men in the countryside that “rural youth,” defined by their

59 Maeda Ai, Maeda Ai chosakushū, vol.2 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1989), 191, trans. and quoted in Barbara Sato, “Commodifying and Engendering Morality: Self-Cultivation and the Construction of the ‘Ideal Woman’ in 1920s Mass Women’s Magazines,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, ed. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 105. 60 Barbara Sato, “Commodifying and Engendering Morality,” 99-130. 61 Ann Waswo, “The Transformation of Rural Society 1900-1905,” 561-562.

!47 specialized knowledge in agriculture and military training, could pursue new career paths of their own. The seinendan groups were the first step on this path to success.

Youth Identity and Rural Modernity

In the institutional history of seinendan associations, World War I marked the start of rapid centralization of village seinendan groups. Government officials supervised their training methods, ideologies, awards, and communication across the country. But, as in the spontaneous nature of the night study groups before World War I, the standardization of seinendan did not mean that youth blindly succumbed to state-centered mobilization. Quite the contrary, many youth continued to undertake their own activities, often beyond the scope of officials’ control. In fact, annual conventions of the Greater Japan Seinendan Federation saw heated debates by young representatives challenging state bureaucrats. Youth took advantage of the national network and the improved status of youth in village affairs. For them, youth group activities provided a window to the national and global spaces beyond their own villages.

Centralizing forces grew stronger over the course of the 1910s and 20s. Yamamoto

Takinosuke, Tanaka Giichi, and officials of the Home and Education ministries re-organized the locally formed youth groups into a national network. The nationalization process was accompanied by a more forceful standardization. Government funding encouraged many youth groups to adjust their goals to closely match those proclaimed at the national level, especially the goal of improving the success rate at the conscription exam.62 Shūyōdan (The Moral Training

Group), a rapidly expanding network of educators led by Hasunuma Monzō, offered blueprints of new youth training programs for seinendan activities. In August 1915, for example, shūyōdan

62 Tani Teruhiro, Seinen no seiki (Tokyo: Dōseisha, 2003), 60-85.

!48 gathered 83 rural youth and conducted the first “mock self-rule village” training at Lake Habara in Fukushima for eight days. The participants were assigned to small tents representing households and ran both the households and the village through consensus-building exercises.

The shūyōdan educators adopted the use of tents from German Wandervogel activities and torches from the British Boy Scouts, and also taught Shinto-style misogi prayers in the water.63

Tazawa Yoshiharu, the first director of the Greater Japan National Seinendan Association founded in 1924, enthusiastically incorporated the training of shūyōdan. Their methods of teaching frugality, hard work, and a communal spirit became the mainstream of training throughout the prewar period, to the extent that Yamamoto Takinosuke argued that shūyōdan were the executive leaders of seinendan.64

While the impact of these forces of standardization on the life of rural youth varied, one phenomenon stood out: young people in the villages began writing. Seinendan members all over the country produced an enormous number of newsletters [seinendanpō] during the 1920s and

30s. These took different formats; some were collections of handwritten essays, others were more well-formatted works obviously edited by professional publishing companies. Some had a larger number of essays written by youth themselves compared to others that mainly served the function of a news bulletin board. 1.3 million issues of seinendanpō produced in various locations are archived today.65

63 Ibid., 86-89; Shūyōdan, Shūyōdan undō hachijūnenshi gaishi (Tokyo: Shūyōdan, 1985), 76-82, 106-108. 64 Yamamoto Takinosuke, “Ryōsha no kankei,” Kōjō (December 1922): 15-19. 65 Scholar Tani Teruhito digitized them and made available at the Seinendanpō Ākaibusu, Tsuruga College, Fukushima. Now housed in the Japan Youth Club in Tokyo.

!49 The medium of seinendan newsletters gave rise to a new practice of identity construction as “rural youth.” The phenomenon was analogous to the proliferation of youth magazines in the

1890s. Scholar Kimura Naoe points out the importance of the act of writing in the creation of the concept of “youth” (seinen), arguing that for seinen, the act of writing itself—filling the easily accessible media with youthful slogans—rather than the content of their writing, nurtured youth identity.66 Similarly, seinendan members used the act of writing and the space of newsletters to practice their identity as “rural youth.” One commonality in their writings was to regard youth as a distinctive group that had always existed in history. One newsletter put it, “now society, which had forgotten about seinen for a long time, has recognized the power of seinen again. Whether it was thanks to the seinen's own power or the force of the time, either way the seinen who have been quietly thinking and quietly disciplining themselves are now expected to take the grave responsibility of carrying out social reforms.”67 They also used seinendan newsletters to develop more abstract philosophies. The appearance of essays like “Why Thou Dost Live” and “Hope is the Life of Youth,” which had no reference to practical problems, revealed that, in addition to the act of writing, such acts of philosophizing became another attribute of rural youth.68

Gaining knowledge about foreign counterparts also became an important marker of seinendan members. Leaders and bureaucrats in Tokyo often introduced German and other

European youth groups in the national seinendan journal Teikoku seinen (Imperial Youth), flooding almost every issue with their feelings of admiration for and rivalry with these groups.

66 Kimura, , 173. 67 Tahata Ryōkichi, “Itoshiki kora no tameni 7,” Yamane seishi kaihō 19 (August 25, 1926): 1. 68 Ishigaki Yūki sei, “Seikatsu no igi: Nanji wa nazeni ikite irunoka.” Yamane seishi kaihō 19 (August 15, 1926): 1; Suzuki Jōichi, “Kibō wa seinen no inochi.”Akita-shi seinendan danpō 3 (November 20, 1926): 1.

!50 The hierarchical passage of information from the center to localities was not the only path of foreign influence. Many rural youth spontaneously learned about and adopted foreign movements at the grassroots level. Another youth newsletter in Akita, for example, published a letter from Mussolini addressed to Japanese youth. Mussolini praised the Japanese empire for absorbing Western culture and introduced the Blackshirt Fascist youth to the reader.69 The youth often used expressions from foreign literature. Goethe and Tolstoy were two of their favorites:

“As Goethe says, the fate of Germany rests on the shoulders of German youth… The development of our desperate village now rests on our shoulders, the shoulders of youth,” wrote a seinendan member.70 These youth absorbed the information coming from outside their living space—whether national or international—with eagerness.

Adding to their intensifying identity as rural youth was the destruction of the urban capital in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Witnessing the devastation of metropolitan

Tokyo, many people started questioning the value of material wealth and the definition of national strength. One young farmer recorded his belief in his diary that this natural disaster had been destined to happen to punish a sinful urban culture:

Of late the vainglorious striving of [those] city people had reached extremes that caused poor, simple farmers no end of anxiety. With their elegant clothes and their gold teeth, gold rings and gold watch chains, they flitted from one lavish social affair to another. They would go off on trips to the seashore or the mountains to escape the heat . . . and tour the famous sites. But now all that has vanished as if in a dream, consumed by fire, and suddenly they find themselves reduced to misery. It seems that Heaven found it necessary to chastise them with a natural disaster in order to protect the nation.71

69 “Itari shushō Mushisorīni shi yori Nihon seinen danjo ni okurareshi meshisēji,” Yamane seishi kaihō 19 (August 25, 1926): 2. 70 Kimura Ryūtarō, “Nōson seinen no shinro,” Yamane seishi kaihō 23 (December 5, 1926): 3-4. 71 Quoted in Suzuki Masayuki, “Taishōki nōmin seiji shisō no ichi sokumen jō,” Nihonshi kenkyū 174 (January 1977): 13, trans. and re-quoted in Waswo, 592-593.

!51 ! The government policy of seinendan standardization, the destruction of urban modernity in the earthquake, and the ability of young people to make contact with the outside world gave village youth a sense of belonging to the national and global stage. It expanded the space of imagination for rural youth far beyond the village boundaries. Many other elements associated with centralization affected this new identity. New military-like uniforms, flags, and seinendan songs created by nationally famous composers symbolized the network of modern youth.

Although the earlier youth groups struggled to bring modernity to the rural countryside, by the

1920s, they turned the definition of “success”—even “modernity”—from an urban-centered one conditioned by higher education to a rural-based lifestyle with new assertiveness in their communication sphere.

The Politics of Age

The rise of “rural youth” as a new category in and outside the seinendan encouraged young farmers to engage in various social confrontations in the 1920s. Many participated in tenant disputes, rice riots, as well as socialist and communist party activities, directly challenging the police and national seinendan leaders. In the institutional history of seinendan, these confrontations are considered parts of the “autonomy movement.” Despite the broad scope of their goals and activism, both youth themselves and seinendan bureaucratic leaders framed the new assertiveness of these farmers as the increasing power of the young generation against older ones, rather than rural against urban, local branches against the central bureaucracy, or leftist ideals against capitalist-industrialist state goals.

!52 Most famous in the “autonomy movement” were the youth of the Shimoina county youth group in Nagano prefecture. They argued that their youth group was a voluntary, autonomous group not controlled by bureaucrats or military cliques and that youth, “the engine of social progress and creation of history in any era,” shared “the same stance with the general masses.”

They incorporated the arguments of Ōyama Ikuo and Yamakawa Hitoshi, liberal and socialist thinkers of the 1920s, asserting that youth education should adopt “scientific research methods,” and that youth deserved “freedom to study social issues of all regions, past, present, and future.”72 The Shimoina youth group was greatly influenced by the Liberal Youth League, formed in 1921 to put into practice Yamakawa’s socialism in the Shimoina region. With the

League members, the youth group organized demonstrations to demand universal suffrage and oppose the Peace Preservation Law, and invited Ōyama Ikuo, Fuse Tatsuji, and other high-profile social activists to speak about youth’s autonomy.73 To resist bureaucratic control, the Shimoina youth group did not join the Greater Japan Seinendan Federation for more than a year after it was established in 1924. Shimoina’s example inspired some seinendan groups in other regions to resist official control, particularly those in provincial towns that were already exposed to leftist activism.74

The issue of age limit, yet again, became the central point of contestation in the autonomy movement, but for a different reason from the 1915 decree: the youth insisted that membership be strictly limited to those under 25 of age and not allow older leaders to have a say.

72 Ōgushi, “Seinendan jishuka undō no ayumi,” 92. 73 Ibid. 74 On more detail on Shimoina seinenkai’s autonomy movement, see Ōgushi “Seinendan jishuka undō no ayumi”; Hirayama, Seinen shūdanshi, 107-268, and Kanō.

!53 The Shimoina youth group already presented the youth-centered principle, stating that “the seinendan has to be for the youth and by the youth” during the discussion on “methods to establish autonomous seinendan” in the Second National Seinendan Convention held in 1923. At the 1925 Convention, Okano Kenzō, a representative from Kanagawa prefecture, criticized

Tazawa Yoshiharu’s presence and participation in discussion: “We would like someone who has children or grandchildren to refrain from making comments. We would like, just among us young people, to discuss slowly and thoroughly and proceed with the convention spiritedly.” His remark was met with applause from the audience. The argument that supported the strict age limit came up repeatedly during the conventions in these years, but was voted down by the bureaucratic leaders each time.75

The initiative of young people to politicize their age shows how the category of “youth” had become a force of its own by the 1920s. At the turn of the twentieth century, education experts and government officials had defined the stage of life between children and adults— adolescence or youth (both translated as “seinen”)—as something distinctive. They imported the popular theory of the leading American psychologist, Stanley Hall, who applied the Darwinian developmental theory to human life stages moving from primitive to civilized. In his theory, adolescents exhibited various traits—impulsive, violent, aggressive, easily manipulated, and prone to hysteria—during physical and psychological transitions. Most importantly for these experts, teenagers needed structured discipline and guidance to get through this difficult stage.76

75 Dai Nihon rengō seinendan, Danpō 1 (July 1925): 40-94. Hirayama, Seinen shūdanshi, 92-93. 76 See David Ambaras, Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 86-87. State officials continued to list up the “youthful” traits in the 1920s and 1930s. See Kubo, Nihon fashizumu kyōiku, 180, on a governmental report on “Youth’s Psychology” (1931).

!54 Hall’s theory dominated European youth education, breaking class-based demographic understanding and “democratizing” the concept of adolescence as applicable to all the teenaged.77 Yamamoto Takinosuke’s advocacy of the modern seinendan equally embraced the need to provide structure to youth and, at the same time, aimed at applying the concept of youth across economic and regional hierarchies. By the time of the autonomy movement in the 1920s, both youth education experts and seinendan bureaucrats realized that this demarcation of youth and adolescence as a separate and independent category had become a double-edged sword, now providing a weapon for youth themselves. Young people no longer appreciated the model of

“experienced farmers” [rōnō], exemplified by Ninomiya Sontoku, in the way agrarianists and

Hōtokukai activists had envisioned.78 Seinendan members started to believe that being under 25 years old had given them legitimacy and the power to challenge the establishment in the family, village, and state.

Conclusion

In discussion on Japan’s assimilation policy in its colonies, scholars rarely question how assimilation, or nationalization, of the populace in Japan took place in the first place. As a powerful device that spread a national consciousness in Japanese rural peripheries, the seinendan highlight a few elements about its nationalizing process. Emperor-centered nationalism spread not only because it was taught through the Boshin Imperial Rescript, school curriculum, and

77 See John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770-Present (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 133-183. 78 During the 1880s and 1890s, Meiji agrarianists praised models of “experienced farmers,” [rōnō] such as “Meiji Three Great Rōnō”—Nakayama Naozō, Nara Senji, and Funatsu Denjibei. They exemplified early agrarian ideals. However, according to a study conducted by the seinendan, young farmers in the 1920s did not find their biographies as inspiring as other “successful” figures. See Takeda Kyōji, Nihon nōson shugi no kōzō (Tokyo: Sōfūsha, 1999), 86-97. Dai Nihon rengō Seinendan chōsa-ka, Seinen yomimono ni kansuru chōsa II (Tokyo: Dai Nihon rengō Seinendan, 1929), 33-37.

!55 propaganda, but because it was carried by concepts like “rural youth” that attracted various people and groups. The idea of “rural youth” mediated conflicting interests among government officials, the army, and youth themselves. One example is the overlap of interests between the army and youth in adhering to the age limit. The army’s demand for an age limit on seinendan membership generated a new consciousness about age among young people, triggering the

“autonomy movement” against bureaucratic control. The concept of “rural youth” became a field of contestation in the national discourse because it could be deployed for and against the establishment.

Another element apparent in seinendan mobilization is that ideological education was a continuous process. The terms such as “kyōka” (moral suasion), “shūyō” (moral training), and

“social education” remained important throughout the pre-1945 period. The increasing emphasis on these terms, as well as the rapid institutional expansion of the seinendan, mirrored the challenge and need felt by state officials to counter the rise of “society” in the 1910s and 20s.

While the colonial governments accelerated assimilation policy in Taiwan and Korea through

Cultural Rule, the home government was also experimenting new strategies to nationalize youth in Japanese rural peripheries.

The attraction of the seinendan for village youth derived from a possibility for achieving a rural modernity, in which the presence of the army was irreplaceable. The military pressured state officials to allocate resources for youth education in the countryside. The influence of the military was not limited to the institutional support, the education given to conscripts, or the modern uniform and discipline that impressed people. In the world of aggressive empires, where military capability determined the strength of the nation, army officials called for “rural youth”

!56 to shoulder that burden. Through the symbolic image of the world-class military, youth pictured the role of “rural youth” larger than their village boundaries. !

!57 ! ! ! ! ! Chapter 2: Youth Discourse and Agrarianism in the Colonies !

While Japan mobilized “rural youth” to spread the ideology of Emperor-centered agrarian nationalism to strengthen its empire, the colonized parts of East Asia deployed the idea of

“youth” to counter imperial forces. Colonial intellectuals often used the metaphor of a human lifespan to make sense of their colonial status in a Social Darwinian world. “Childhood,”

“youth,” and “the old” represented the nation’s vulnerability, vitality, and weakness respectively.

Liang Qichao, a leading reformer in late Qing China, famously applied this metaphor in his

Young China of 1900. Liang argued that, as a dynastic empire, China was old and weak, but as a nation-state, it was young and had hope for the future. “If youth of the entire nation act youthfully, China will become a country of the future; its progress without bounds,” he wrote,

“but if youth of the entire nation act like the aged, China becomes a country of the past, and will soon meet its demise. Therefore, the responsibility for the day rests completely upon our youth alone.”1

Japan’s colonization of Taiwan and Korea drove young intellectuals to adopt youth discourse in the hope of establishing national sovereignty. Highly educated Korean and

1 Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei Liang Qichao san wen xuan.eds. Chen Yongzheng et al. (Hong Kong: San lian shu dian, 1994), 220.

!58 Taiwanese students studying in Japan and China saw powerful youth—particularly Meiji leaders

—as the secret to national strength. They were also inspired by ideologies popular in the early twentieth century, and many turned to socialist and communist ideas. They joined with reformers in Japan, China, and sometimes the Soviet Union in the global wave of youth activism. This in turn threw them into complex youth politics, however. Nationalist youth advocating nation- building through modernization and social reform viewed the recent expansion of the seinendan in Japan as a model to emulate. Socialist youth, in contrast, criticized these “bourgeois” enlighteners for romanticizing the countryside. While competing against each other, they agreed on the importance of mobilizing “rural youth” in restoring national sovereignty.

Their ideological principles, as well as their generational identity as “youth,” forced these intellectual youth to struggle on multiple fronts: against Japanese colonizers, older generations, the traditional landlords, and other anti-colonial groups in a battle over legitimacy and leadership. For them, more than the crackdown by colonial police, the widening gap between the students and farmers constituted a major challenge. Despite their attempt to align with youth in the countryside, the urban students had little to share with impoverished, illiterate tenant farmers.

Even those who joined the youth group movements in larger provincial towns were mired in their own politics in the local contexts, instead of operating as agents of youth leaders in Taipei and Seoul.

In retrospect, this chasm between colonial intellectuals and the rural population and between elite youth leaders and local youth groups provided an opening for Japanese activists of seinendan mobilization. Despite the confrontations and crackdowns, the colonial authorities never sought to suppress the youth-centered discourse and agrarianism spread by the anti-

!59 colonial youth. Instead, by investing more resources and deploying familiar tactics of seinendan mobilization, the colonial officials propelled the trend further. In other words, imperial youth mobilization in the 1930s took advantage of the foundation established by anti-colonial intellectuals in the 1920s.

Korean Students and Modern Youth

If the seinendan movement in Japan was part of the global trend of youth mobilization, so too were youth movements on the Korean peninsula. Japan constituted a large component of the international context that affected Korea. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Japan was the focus of profound interest among Korean leaders as it simultaneously represented the possibility of an independent Asia and a serious threat to Korea's independence. Japan rapidly transformed itself from an old feudal system to a modern Western-style polity, aggressively absorbed Western knowledge, and intervened in Chinese and Korean politics. It turned Korea into a protectorate by

1905 and formally annexed it in 1910. Yet, despite the heightening political tension, the pressing threat of Western imperialism and the proximity of Tokyo led many Korean leaders to look to the model of Meiji Japan.

The concept of “youth” [ch'ŏngnyŏn] as an engine of modernity was introduced to Seoul by Korean students studying in Japan. Having been sent to Japan by the Chosŏn government at the age of 14 in 1904, Ch'oe Nam-sŏn, for example, avidly read Japanese and Western magazines in Tokyo.2 Upon his return, he created the first modern mass magazine in Korea, Sonyŏn (Youth,

1908-1911). Inspired by Taiyō (The Sun), a popular Japanese magazine in the 1900s, Sonyŏn was

2 For a discussion of Ch’oe Nao-sŏn’s impressions in Japan, see Yun Se-jin, “‘Sonyŏn’ kwa ‘Ch’ŏngch’un’ kkaji, kŭndaejŏk chisik ŭi sŭp’ekt’ŏkŭl” in ‘Sonyŏn’ kwa ‘Ch’ŏngch’un’ ŭi ch’ang, ed. Kwan Podŭre (Seoul: Ihwa yoja taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu, 2007), 23-30.

!60 a magazine of literary and social commentary targeting urban youth. In some ways, it possessed a novelty similar to Tokutomi Sohō’s Kokumin no tomo (The Nation’s Friend), a pioneer youth magazine and catalyst of youth movements in 1890s Japan. After working on a number of youth and children’s publications, Ch'oe started another youth magazine, Ch’unch’ŏng (Youth,

1914-1918).3 Through these magazines, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Kwang-su, who both became influential cultural leaders of Korea in the subsequent decades, attempted to inspire youth to become the protagonists of a modern society.4 Korean-language newspapers embraced the youthful forces of the time. In both the main newspapers, Hwangsŏng sinmun (Capital Gazette) and Taehan maeil sinbo (The Korea Daily News), the number of articles that discussed ch'ŏngnyŏn increased rapidly during the course of the first decades of the twentieth century.5

These publications defined Korea as an old, debilitated nation: “Our nation Korea is more than 4000 years old—politics is old, the bureaucracy is old, people are old, [as doddery] as a man of seventy or eighty years.”6 Its age was also associated with corruption and laziness, which the strong and healthy youth were “responsible for cleaning up” to “realize the world of reform and civilization.”7 The authors were well aware that the new attention to youth emanated not only from Japan, but was a worldwide phenomenon. In an article, “Advice to youth,” in the Capital

3 Yi Kwang-su is a controversial figure in the literature in modern Korean history. He is known as the founder of modern Korean literature during and after the colonial period (1910-1945), and became infamous as a pro-Japanese collaborator in the post-liberation period. 4 Yun Se-jin, “‘Sonyŏn’ kwa ‘Ch’ŏngch’un’ kkaji,” 23-30. Sonyŏn and ch'ŏngch'un can be both translated as “youth.” Sonyŏn indicated a young generation or a young man and was used interchangeably with ch'ŏngnyŏn in this period. Ch'ŏngch'un means a “spring” period in one's life, similar to adolescent years or youthful years. 5 In Hwangsŏng sinmun, it increased from 12 in 1905 to 93 in 1908. The youth-related articles in Taehan maeil sinbo also numbered 127 in 1908 and 177 in 1909. Kee-hun Lee [Yi Ki-hun], “Ilcheha ch'ŏngnyŏn tamnon yŏn’gu (A Study on the Youth Discourse in Korea during Japanese Colonial Rule)” (PhD diss., Seoul National University, 2005), 39-40. 6 “Syonyŏn ŭi Han’guk,” Taehan maeil sinbo, July 1, 1910 7 Yi Sun-jong, “Ch'ŏngnyŏn ŭi chagi” Hwangsŏng sinmun, March 4, 1905.

#61 Gazette in 1905, the author divided human life into four stages, in the same way as American scholar Stanley Hall and others conceptualized it at the time, and argued that the second stage, youth, was the key period for education. He explained that “civilized and educated men in the

Western powers studied youth education and designed youth groups,” and “this wave reached

Japan, China, as well as our Korean capital.”8 To these Korean authors, youth education was a new global standard of civilization to which Korea should be ready to adjust.

In applying the generational category of youth to the Korean situation, these authors contrasted the progressive nature of youth to the incompetent older generations. In June 1910, Yi

Kwang-su, then an 18 year-old student studying in Japan, captured the feelings of intellectual youth in an article, “Circumstances of Korean Youth Today,” published in Sonyŏn. “We youth do not have predecessors who can teach and lead us as older generations did,” he argued, “it is a fact that nine out of ten schools are clearly not qualified to teach us.” His negation of earlier generations was probably attributable to the failure of the Kabo reforms attempted by earlier leaders in the 1890s. These modernizing reforms were not able to prevent Korea from losing its national sovereignty. Annexed by Japan and surrounded by multiple imperial forces, Korean youth, “compared to those in other countries or other times, need to make tens or hundreds times more effort” in order to construct a new Korean nation—“whether we youth are aware of our own situation determines the line between the prosperity and decline of the Korean nation.” This was a time of crisis surely, but also an opportunity for youth to achieve greatness because “it is a time like this that made Napoleon a Napoleon, and Washington a Washington.”9

8 Kyeyangsanin, “Kwango Ch'ŏngnyŏn” Hwangsŏng sinmun, February 20, 1905. 9 Koju (Yi Kwang-su), “Kŭmil a Han ch'ŏngnyŏn ŭi kyŏngwu,” Sonyŏn 3, no.6 (June 1910): 26-31.

#62 The drive to develop themselves was common among these educated youth. Yi Kwang-su advocated “self-training and self-cultivation” [chasu chayang] both as individuals and in groups.

Yun Chi-ho, an American-educated Christian leader, established a youth group among students in

1909—or what they called “one large spiritual circle of committed youth” —to exchange knowledge and become leaders of society.10 Similar kinds of intellectual youth groups had been formed among students studying in Tokyo in the 1890s.11 Although not as numerous as the youth groups formed in Japan in the 1890s, reports of voluntary gatherings and lecture events by

“motivated youth” in the Korean homeland appeared in newspapers in the 1900s and 1910s.12

Some youth saw the generational force as more important to successful nation-building than the national roots or tradition. Meiji Japan, in their view, presented a strong case that linked youth initiatives to national independence. Despite Japan’s colonial rule over Korea, their fascination with the success of the Meiji leaders in repelling Western imperialism persisted in the writings of Korean students.

The day when the American fleet arrived in Urawa Port was, indeed, a crisis that challenged Japan’s national survival... and the Japanese nation analyzed this enormous problem and brought about a breakthrough... that was no one but the Japanese nation – [or rather] Japanese youth – that solved their own problem… We have to be like 13 !Japanese youth of 40 or 50 years ago, rather than like those of today. Many of these students engaged in anti-colonial movements, but they also believed that the crisis should be dealt with by emulating Japanese youth who had faced a similar challenge

10 “Ch'ŏngnyŏn hakyuhŏe ch'uijisŏ,” Sonyŏn 2, no.8 (September 1909): 14-16. 11 Ch'inmokhŏe, cheguk ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe, for example. “Ponhŏe kŭmsŏk chi kam,” Taehan hŭnghakpo 13 (November 1909): 1-6. See Kee-hun Lee, 37-38. 12 For example, “Ch'ŏnghŏe kŭnmyŏn,” Hwangsŏng sinmun, November 8, 1905. Kyeyang Sanin, “Kwango Ch'ŏngnyŏn,” Hwangsŏng sinmun, February 20, 1905; “Sonyŏngye p'unggi ka yŏkyŏsi ho a,” Hwangsŏng sinmun, August 14, 1909. 13 “Ne ch'aekim,” Hak chi kwang [Lux Scientiae] 15 (March 1918): 1-6.

#63 half a century before. Korean nationalist youth regarded the modern nation-state as a product of generational achievements in the world of Social Darwinian competition.14 They turned to the young figures in Japan's recent history or to Europe's imperial examples rather than to their ancestors in the long, allegedly continuous, history of Korea.15 Embracing a strong generational identity, these youth did not consider it contradictory to be fascinated by the Japanese nation and simultaneously engage in the anti-colonial activities, which culminated in the March First

Independence Movement of 1919.

Local Youth Groups After the March First Movement

The March First Movement sparked changes in colonial rule and triggered a new youth activism. Urban youth—mostly students—played the leading role in the movement. Inspired by

Woodrow Wilson's speech on self-determination, Korean students in Seoul (and Tokyo) drafted declarations of independence, conducted school strikes, and led street demonstrations which spread across the peninsula within a couple of weeks.16 The official record states that nearly

13,000 students in public and private schools participated in the movement.17 The literary leaders who created Korea’s youth discourse were actively involved in organizing the nation-wide mobilization. They included Ch'oe Nam-sŏn, whom the colonial authorities defined as “the most trusted person by youth and students.”18

14 Another example is “Abando ch'ŏngnyŏn ŭi samyŏng,” Chosŏn ilbo, April 27, 1921. 15 See Andre Schmidt, Korea Between Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 171-198 for discussion on how a Korean ethnic consciousness, particularly a history of minjok, developed between 1895 and 1919. 16 See Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku, Sōjō to gakkō (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1920). See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) about the influence of Woodrow Wilson on the March First Movement. 17 Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku, Sōjō to gakkō, 8-9. 18 Ibid., 1.

#64 After these demonstrations were quelled, Korea saw a surge of youth groups at the local county level. “At least 10 youth groups are being created around the country every day, and there are more than 70 groups just in Seoul right now,” The newspaper Tonga ilbo reported in June

1920.19 Both Korean reporters and colonial officials described the rapid growth of youth groups as “sprouting like bamboo shoots after a rain.”20 The government counted 251 youth groups

[ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe] in 1920, 446 in 1921, and 488 in 1922.21 It was not an exaggeration when

Tonga ilbo wrote in December 1922 that “purely social youth groups flourish and have reached more than 500 in number. Every county is witnessing an expansion of youth groups, and including religious youth groups, there are more than a thousand organizations.”22

The rise of youth groups in county capitals reflected the changes underway in Korean society in the post-March First period. One was the formation of new alliances between traditional landlord families and younger elites outside Seoul. During the demonstrations, the student generation began to collaborate with local land-holding leaders. Many sons of the landed class were in schools in urban areas, and through their student networks, the landed class mobilized rallies in rural areas. In fact, 56% of arrests during the movement were of people in the agricultural sector, whereas students and teachers comprised only 13% of the arrests.23 The failure of the independence movement made the young leaders realize the need to expand

19 “Chŏn Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe yŏnhap kisŏnghŏe chojik,” Tonga ilbo. June 30, 1920. 20 Ibid. Other examples include Yi Tonhua, “Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe yŏnhaphŏe ŭi sŏngnipe ch'uihaya,” Kaebyŏk 7 (January 1921): 33, and Zenra-nanddō naimu-bu. Seinenkai shidō hōshin (Kwangju: Zenra-nandō, 1922), 1. 21 Including those with other labels, such as “moral training (shūyō) groups,” “abstinence clubs,” “social groups,” “semi-religious groups,” these numbers went up to 985 in 1920, and nearly 3,000 in the following years. Chōsen sōtokufu keimu-kyoku. Chōsen chian jōkyō (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1922), 179-180. 22 “Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏn yŏnhaphŏe ichunyŏn kinyŏm,” Tonga ilbo, December 1, 1922. 23 Tongnip undongsa p'yŏnch'an wiwŏnhŏe, Tongnip undongsa che 3-kwŏn (Seoul: Tongnip yugongja saŏp ki’gŭm unyong wiwŏnhoe, 1971), 889.

#65 institutional support in the countryside in order to achieve their goal of recovering sovereignty.24

The new colonial policy called “Cultural Rule” facilitated the spread of youth groups and also created a shared space for colonial officials and Korean activists. Cultural Rule intended to expand education and promote cultural assimilation of the Korean population. At the same time, it attempted to placate anti-Japanese forces by allowing Korean-language publications and giving

Korean leaders greater access to capital and governance. Two national newspapers launched in

April 1920, Tonga ilbo and Chosŏn ilbo, served as the major medium and catalyst for the spread of local youth groups. Learning from the reports, youth groups copied one another. Typically, the landholding class who had donated a significant sum of money formed a preparatory committee.

For the inauguration ceremony of the associations, they organized events like sports festivals and public lectures. Their attitude toward colonial authorities was ambivalent, if not overtly supportive. They invited Japanese and Korean officials—the county head, president of financial union, chief of police, school principals, and other powerful figures in the county.25 Like the

Japanese seinendan, their goals stated “to improve knowledge, ethics, and body of the youth,”

“to expand modern education,” and “to improve social morals.” They pledged to engage in lectures, debates, amateur plays, tennis competitions, and night schools for uneducated villagers.26

These youth groups not only mediated between colonial officials and Korean leaders, but also bridged generations in local leadership. The example of Chaenyŏng county in Hwanghae

24 Kin Ikkan [Kim Ik-han], “Shokuminchiki Chōsen ni okeru chihō shihai taisei no kōchiku katei to nōson shakai hendō” (PhD diss., University of Tokyo, 1995), 261-264. 25 Kanamori Jōsaku, 1920-nendai Chōsen no shakaishugi undōshi (Tokyo: Mirai sha, 1985), 16-20. 26 Zenra-nandō naimu-bu, Seinenkai shidō hōshin, 2; Kin, “Shokuminchiki Chōsen ni okeru chihō shihai taisei,“ 264-265. Kanemori, 1920-nendai Chōsen, 15-20.

#66 province shows that through the new county youth groups, the traditional local (landed) elite sought modernization within the conservative social hierarchy. In Chaenyŏng, a small number of landlords initiated the youth group movement in May 1920. These leaders worked as Tonga ilbo representatives in the region, and formed the Chaenyŏng landlord association at the same time.

They advocated modern education; “we should alter the previous use of the hyanggyo (local

Confucian academy)” and “establish a school that could absorb new customs and new thinking, sometimes provide lectures and debates, and spread new knowledge.”27 Rather than challenging the old Confucian social order, scholar Tsuji Hironori argues, this youth group functioned as a forum for collaboration between old and new forces in the local community.28 Perhaps these groups also provided a way to re-absorb highly educated but jobless youth back to the local social order.29 These youth groups led by multiple generations and supported by both Korean and

Japanese leaders played a mediating role among many parties in county politics.

Young intellectuals in Seoul who were more overtly anti-colonial did not miss the chance to network with these local youth groups. They established the Korea Youth Group Association

[Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe yŏnhaphŏe] in December 1920. Soon one fifth of the local youth groups on the peninsula joined this national association.30 The core organizers of the association consisted of well-known anti-colonial activists, such as Chang Tŏk-su, Kim Myŏng-sik, O Sang-

27 Tonga ilbo, June 18, 1920 in Tsuji Hironori, “Shokuminchiki jitsuryoku yōsei undō ni okeru renzoku to tenkan,” Chōsenshi kenkyūkai ronbunshū 37 (Oct. 1999): 81. 28 Tsuji, “Shokuminchiki jitsuryoku yōsei undo,” 18; Kin, “Shokuminchiki Chōsen ni okeru chihō shihai taisei,“ 261-269 makes a similar point. 29 See Kanamori, 1920-nendai Chōsen, 17-18 for this point. 30 “Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏn yŏnhaphŏe ichunyŏn kinyŏm,” Tong-a ilbo, December 1, 1922. Most of the members concentrated in South Kyŏngsang, South Hamgyŏng, and Hwanghae provinces. “Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe yŏnhaphŏe chojikdanch'e illamp'yo,” Asŏng 1 (March 1921): 103-106.

#67 gŭn, Kim Sa-guk, and Yi Yŏng, some of whom were also known as writers for Tonga ilbo.31

They had come to embrace a Korean national consciousness, socialist ideas, or both, while studying in Japan and became vocal negotiators with the colonial authorities upon returning to

Korea. O Sang-gŭn, the president of the association, pointed out the need for a national association for youth groups to “unite the spirit, principles, and activities” of these important local forces.32 In order to improve cooperation among youth groups, the association planned to support publications, lectures, workshops, night schools, and sports festivals. They placed the strongest emphasis on the reform of old customs and assistance for youth’s schooling.33 Although the membership was smaller than the leaders were aiming for, their close connection with Tonga ilbo allowed them to exercise large influence on other groups that paid close attention to their voices and activities.

It was no coincidence that the activities and structure of both individual youth groups and the national association resembled those of the Japanese seinendan. These young nationalists had witnessed with their own eyes the expansion of the seinendan institutions and their agrarian nationalism in Japan. The seinendan served as the clearest reference point for the leaders of the

Korea Youth Group Association. “European countries, following Germany, are all trying to organize youth groups. Especially in a country like Japan, they ally with people who have prominent social stature in order to organize youth groups everywhere and train youth,” wrote O

31 The preparatory group was established on June 28, 1920. For details on the establishment of the Korea Youth Group Association, see An Kŏn-ho, “1920-yŏndae chŏnban’gi Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe yŏnhaphŏe e kwanhan yŏn’gu” (MA thesis, Sungsil University, 1993), 22-27. 32 O Sang-gŭn, “Chŏlsilhan kagohaes? wanjŏnhan tanch'e toigi rŭl yoham,” Kaebyŏk 6 (December 1920): 43-44 33 Yi Ton-hwa, “Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe yŏnhaphŏe ŭi sŏngni e ch'uihaya,” Kaebyŏk 7 (January 1921): 36.

#68 Sang-gŭn a few months after launching the association.34 “In Japan and other countries, youth groups developed in each and every village, spreading like a cobweb. Considering that, our current status may not be a cause for pride, yet as a new-comer, the growth [of youth groups] in such a short period is a world record,” wrote Tonga ilbo on the second anniversary of the association.35 Despite their empire-colony relationship—or perhaps because of it—the format of the seinendan attracted Korea's young elites who hoped to nurture national consciousness among the wider population in the same way that it had attracted state officials and social reformers in

Japan.

Taiwanese Students Between Japan and China

While county youth groups were spreading in the Korean peninsula, the idea of “youth” also circulated among the intellectual youth in another Japanese colony, Taiwan. Taiwanese students studying in Tokyo started a journal, Taiwan qingnian (Tâi oân chheng liân, Taiwanese

Youth), in 1920. Like the spread of youth groups in Korea, this journal reflected the post-World

War I global slogan of self-determination as well as the new Cultural Rule that was also launched in Taiwan. As the first organized voice advocating self-determination and Taiwanese nationalism,

Taiwan qingnian occupied a unique place in the modern history of Taiwan. In this historic publication, its editors defined the writers and readers as “youth.”

The term “youth” or “qingnian” first appeared in Taiwan earlier than the journal itself and represented the generation educated in Japanese and Chinese institutions. “Youth circles” became a common phrase used in Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, a bilingual newspaper of the

34 O Sang-gŭn, “Kŭmil ŭi munje: Chibang ch'ŏngnyŏndanch'e paljŏnch'aek,” Tonga ilbo, February 25, 1921. 35 “Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏn yŏnhaphŏe ijunyŏn kinyŏm,” Tonga ilbo, December 1, 1922.

#69 colonial Government-General of Taiwan (GGT), in 1905. It referred to the elite youth who obtained a modern school education and Japanese language skills in addition to training in the traditional Chinese classics. Since the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895, the GGT had been attempting to subvert the prestige of the civil service exam of Qing China and supply a new status symbol with its own institutions. Toward this end, the GGT established an elite Japanese language school and gave titles of honor to local leading figures. By 1905, a decade of colonial rule and the recent victory in the Russo-Japanese War had produced a small group of bilingual youth among the upper classes. Taiwan’s traditional elite classes expected these “youth circles” to more effectively negotiate with the colonial authorities.

The new focus on “youth,” however, had an effect of disturbing the vertical age hierarchy common among Taiwanese elites. The new generation aimed at a transition from the privilege of seniority to youth-centered nation-building. Chen Boyu, for example, expressed in the article

“Taiwan’s Youth Circles” in October 1905: “There are old people [lao], youth [zhuang], and children [you].” He explained the division of ages in classical Chinese terms, but then claimed that “those who represent the nation [guomin]” and “take on the great responsibility” are the youth—expressed in the new term, “qingnian.” Chen did not extol the masculine, militant characteristic of youth that the Japanese public was celebrating at the time. Rather, he warned the reader against the danger of reckless acts that had characterized Taiwanese youth’s resistance against the Japanese, as well as the meaningless deaths of many Japanese soldiers fighting the

Russians. Youth should observe the “large forces of the world” and “become a citizen of the greater nation”—to achieve the goal of the nation, “never give up, but study.”36

36 Chen Boyu, “Taiwan zhi qing nian jie,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, October 28, 1905, 9.

#70 “Youth circles” not only challenged the age hierarchy among Taiwanese elites, but worked more closely with Japanese colonizers than the older leaders expected. They formed youth groups in the 1910s under auspice of colonial authorities. Many were created to compensate for a shortage of schools. At the same time, new Taiwanese leaders like Lin

Xiantang, supported by Japanese social activists, advocated a movement to “reform the old customs” and “learn the Japanese language.” To be part of this trend, an increasing number of local elites created youth groups, although still dominated by highly educated youth.37

To this steady expansion of GGT-sanctioned youth education, the journal Taiwan qingnian delivered a powerful blow. Against the pro-colonial character of these youth groups, the

Taiwanese students in Tokyo tied the category of youth specifically to Taiwan’s national consciousness. More than the Taiwanese writers, the Japanese contributors, including famous

Taisho democracy activist Yoshino Sakuzō and professor of Meiji University Izumi Akira, advocated the value of Taiwanese ethnic identity. “Taiwan is not GGT’s Taiwan. I demand that

Taiwanese people be self-aware of being Taiwanese,” Izumi argued, and in the inaugural issue of the journal, he defined their goal as “self-ruled Taiwan.”38

Nevertheless, the task of building an ethnic consciousness was anything but straightforward. Nationalist activists who allied with the students abroad established the Taiwan

Cultural Association as their operational base in Taiwan in October 1921. Both these students and activists faced similar challenges. Their imagination of Taiwan started from a bitter

37 Chen Wen Sung (Winston) [Chen Wensong], “Shokuminchi shihai to ‘seinen’: sōtokufu no ‘seinen’ kyōka seisaku to chiiki shakai no henyō” (PhD diss., University of Tokyo, 2008), 83–89. 38 Izumi Akira, “Taiwan tōmin ni tsugu,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.1 (July 1920): 7.

#71 realization that it was a tiny island located on periphery of the world.39 To make up for this, they identified themselves as Han Chinese, proud of the magnificent history and culture of the mainland. “The 3.5 million current Taiwanese residents are part of Han ethnicity, which enjoys a long history of more than four thousand years,” Lin Chenglu claimed in his article on self- awareness of Taiwanese youth, “needless to say we are totally different from the 80 thousand uncivilized barbarians inhabiting the Central Mountains and Taidong mountainous region.”40

Even Cai Peifeng, who was more reflective about Taiwanese discrimination against the aborigines in his advocacy of equal treatment between Japanese and Taiwanese, proudly presented the “Han Group’s Distinctive Features” as “loving peace, admiring ancestors, valuing substance, and forbearing.”41

These Taiwanese youth were drawn to the anti-colonial revolutionary movements of early

1920s China. A pioneering magazine for these Chinese movements, New Youth (Xin qingnian, started in Shanghai in 1915 as Youth Magazine), was an obvious source of inspiration. The

Taiwanese journal reprinted a copy of the article “Call to Youth,” which the leading revolutionary Chen Duxiu published when he founded Youth Magazine:

Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period of life. The function of youth in society is the same as that of a fresh and vital cell in a human body… I only, with tears, place my plea before the young and vital youth, in the hope that they will achieve self-awareness, and begin to struggle. What is this self-awareness? It is to be conscious of the value and responsibility of one’s young life and vitality, to maintain one’s self-respect, which should not be lowered. What is the struggle? It is to exert one’s intellect, discard

39 Starting from the opening words of the inaugural issue of Taiwan qing nian, it was repeatedly mentioned. “Kantō no ji,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.1 (July 1920), 1. 40 Lin Chenglu, “Shin jidai ni shosuru Taiwan seinen no kakugo,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.1 (July 1920): 29. 41 See Cai Peifeng “Wagatō to warera,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.4 (October 1920): 13-24; Cai Peifeng, “Han zu zhi gu you xing,” Taiwan qing nian 2, no.3 (March 1921): 24-28.

#72 resolutely the old and the rotten, regard them as enemies and as the flood or savage beasts, keep away from their neighborhood and refuse to be contaminated by their 42 !poisonous germs. The connection with Chinese youth activists brought a challenge to the Taiwanese elite youth who valued the lineage of Han culture. Chen Duxiu and other Chinese authors were waging a war against the Confucian system of knowledge and governance. Attracted to their revolutionary attitude, Taiwan minbao also adopted ‘vernacular’ Mandarin Chinese as the main language of publication in 1923. But Taiwanese elite youth still quoted ancient sages and warriors in the original literary Chinese.43 They hesitated to deny Confucianism at large, fearing that it would undercut their self-definition as great Han descendants. In contrast to their hesitation to abolish ancient heritage, they offered passionate voice in favor of the liberation of women and reform of the oppressive family system, conceptually separating this aspect of modernization and their longing for national roots. But in these areas of social reform, Japanese activists, and even the colonial government, were a step ahead of their Chinese reformists.

The most notable characteristic of the vision of these young Taiwanese intellectuals was their rejection of a Social Darwinian competitive world. Their diasporic identity crisis, split between their embrace of the historical heritage of a Great China, and an urge for modern reforms that often justified Japanese dominance, drove them to value their very in-between-ness.

“Taiwan’s new youth are equipped with the unique character and capacity to become the

42 Chen Duxiu, “Jing gao qing nian,” Taiwan min bao, September 1, 1923, 3. Taiwan min bao was the successor of Taiwanese qing nian, continued in Tokyo until August 1927, when they got a permission to publish it in Taiwan. The translation is from S. Y. Teng and J. K. Fairbank eds., China’s Response to the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 240. 43 Many well-known modernist activists and advocates of New Literature, including Lin Xiantang and Cai Huiru, continued practicing classical poetry. See Yokoji Keiko, Wen xue de liu li yu hui gui: san ling nian dai xiang tu wen xue lun zhan (Taipei: Lian he wen xue chu ban she, 2009), 185-187. For details on the complex movements on modernizing the Chinese language, refer to Yurou Zhong, “Script Crisis and Literary Modernity in China, 1916-1958” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014).

#73 middleman for realizing Japan-China friendship,” Zhou Taoyuan argued in the third issue of

Taiwan qingnian. He deplored the neglect of Taiwanese youth by these two nations, questioning whether “it is because the government authorities are afraid of too much potential” of Taiwanese youth, or because “Taiwanese youth have not sought development abroad owing to a lack of discipline and energy.”44 The ideal of perpetual world peace that circulated globally after World

War I was not mere utopian rhetoric for Taiwanese youth. Their self-worth rested in the cooperation between nations, particularly between Japan and China, not in the severe competition assumed in the Social Darwinian world. The editors saw “justice, humanity, freedom, and peace” coming to characterize the new era, and called for the Taiwanese youth to realize this ideal.45 This stood in stark contrast with the goal of survival of the fittest embraced by their Korean counterparts.

The attachment of Taiwanese youth to mainland China was reflected in their criticism toward “the old,” which was significantly milder than that of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese youth of the same period or even the Taiwanese “youth circles” prevalent earlier. The articles published in Taiwan qingnian and Taiwan minbao called for youth’s self-awareness, defining them as the most important agent of social reform. But they rarely expressed antagonism against older generations. The “youthful” characteristics praised by activists in Japan and Korea may have been vague and inconsistent, but Taiwanese youth’s respect for “the old” constituted a significant obstacle to demarcating their age category, however eagerly they embraced of the

44 Zhou Taoyuan, “Zen Ajia no taisei yori mitaru gen Taiwan seinen ni taisuru kyūmu,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.3 (September 1920): 51-52. 45 See “Kantō no ji,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.1 (July 1920): 1; “Kyōjaku tōsō yori jiyū heiwa e,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.4 (October 1920), 1; “Kantō no ji,” Taiwan qing nian 2, no.1 (January 1921): 1, for example. Although this was the dominant argument put forth by main writers and editors of Taiwanese qing nian and Taiwan min bao, there were, of course, some exceptions. Ke Di, “Qing nian zi zhi tan,” Taiwan min bao, October 1, 1924, 2 for example.

#74 word qingnian (youth).

Japan as a colonial oppressor was the only clear “Other” for Taiwanese youth. Instead of opposing “the old,” they worked against “conservative” forces, which referred to the oppression of the colonial government and the Taiwanese elite who curried favor with it.46 Goyō shinshi

(government-hired gentlemen) were their nemesis. The confrontation centered on two policy areas: equal access to education for Taiwanese and Japanese students and the establishment of a

Taiwanese parliament, modeled after Irish home rule. Adding legitimacy to their anti-colonial identity construction was the crackdowns conducted by the GGT. Once branches of the Cultural

Association began spreading around 1924, reports on violence, arrests, and oppression by the

GGT filled the pages of Taiwan minbao. These reports and experiences, in turn, nurtured a common identity as Taiwanese youth.

At the same time, Japan was an obvious modernizing model. The leaders of the Meiji

Restoration appeared as heroic in their eyes as they did to Korean youth. “Look at the era of the

Meiji Restoration. Itō, Ōkubo, Saigō, Itagaki, Niijima were the steadfast among the youth,” Wu

Keji argued and contrasted them to those “lacking patriotism and group spirit” in the new

Republic of China.47 Beyond the Meiji Restoration, establishing constitutional politics and winning the Russo-Japanese War “all depended on youthful enthusiasm and struggle,”48 another author claimed in 1924. The Japanese seinendan drew the attention of Taiwanese youth in the same way that it had O Sang-gŭn in Korea. Xu Qingxiang published an article entitled,

46 For example, “Kantō no ji,” Taiwan qing nian 2, no. 5 (June 1921): 1, and Jian Ru, “Guan yu Zhanghua si xiang wen ti di kao an,” Taiwan min bao, September 11, 1924, 4-5. 47 Wu Keji, “Taiwan qing nian zi jue lun,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.4 (October 1920): 17. 48 Lu Yankun, “Ben dao qing nian zhi jue xing,” Taiwan min bao, October 21, 1924, 10.

#75 “Encouraging Local Seinendan,” which expressed his admiration at the wide network and activities of the seinendan in Japan. Their volunteer labor during the construction of the Meiji

Shrine particularly impressed him. “Dear wise youth, please look at how actively youth in every city, town, and village [in Japan] work and how earnestly society gives guidance and support to them,” he begged the reader. Xu did not even modify the state-centric organization of the seinendan in advocating it in Taiwan: the members should be “elementary school graduates,” and the head of each seinendan should be “the village head or school principal whenever possible.”

This was the first time Taiwanese elite youth discussed the importance of enhancing local culture and enlightenment. In other words, attention to the countryside was generated through the discussion of the seinendan.49

Accompanying the rising popularity of the Taiwan Cultural Association, youth groups spread in Taiwan over the course of the 1920s. The association, however, had difficulty in counting the exact number of the affiliated youth groups. Many local groups of the “youth circles” established in the previous decade were endorsed by colonial officials, and many local groups still had dual characteristics in their composition. Chen Wen Sung details the activities of

Yanfeng youth group in Caotun, Taizhong, which was called the most “solid” youth group by the

Cultural Association. Even in the case of the Yanfeng youth group, the Japanese village head

Atsumi Kanzō endorsed it and gave speeches in their ceremonies until it officially became a branch of the Taiwan Popular Party in 1927.50 It embraced a Chinese revolutionary spirit as expressed in its statement of purpose in 1924, quoting the first half of Chen Duxiu’s Call to

49 Xu Qingxiang, “Chihō seinendan wo kanshō su,” Taiwan qing nian 1, no.5 (December 1920): 45-48. 50 Taiwan sōtokufu keimu-kyoku, ed., Taiwan shakai undōshi; Taiwan sōtokufu keisatsu enkakushi dai-ni hen: RyōTai igo no chian jōkyō chūkan (1939, repr. Tokyo: Ryūkei Shosha, 1973), 202.

#76 Youth. The core elite members, having studied in Taipei and Tokyo, erected a Yanfeng youth group building right in front of the village office. This captured the dual characteristics of the youth group—the simultaneous association and confrontation with colonial authorities.51

The leaders of the Taiwan Cultural Association tried to differentiate their youth groups from the previous GGT-led ones in various ways. Since both waved the banner of modernization

—abolition of old customs of funerals, marriage, family hierarchies and so on—they had to advertise that the Cultural Association truly represented the Taiwanese population. Taiwan minbao put up the slogan, “the only organ of public opinion of the Taiwanese,” before its name.

By 1926, “study group” [dushuhui] became a popular name for youth groups, mirroring many

“study groups” formed in mainland China.52 They claimed that most of the “youth groups” [qingnianhui] worked for colonial officials, but study groups were independent and would “conduct real measures to respond to society’s needs.”53 These appeals reflected the difficulty in obtaining recognition among people and legitimacy against colonial authorities. As in Korea, the central body of the Association stood clearly against the colonial authorities, but the local branches often remained ambivalent in political orientation and more subject to politics among local leaders.

Socialist Youth Groups and the Question of Age54

Both in Korea and Taiwan, colonial officials, anti-colonial leaders, local elites, and youth

51 Chen Wen Sung, 277. 52 Similar study groups were formed by Taiwanese students in Japan as well. See reports in Taiwan sōtokufu keimu- kyoku, Taiwan shakai undōshi, 52. 53 “Qing nian hui yu du shu hui,” Taiwan min bao, December 12, 1926, 3-4. 54 I use the term socialism loosely to include a wide range of thoughts in socialism and communism advocated by colonial theorists and activists here.

#77 all had a stake in shaping youth groups to meet their needs. It is easy to imagine that competition took place not only between colonial and anti-colonial forces. Complication of youth mobilization came from various factors, but the split in the anti-colonial camp at the national level contributed to the messy picture. Socialist youth, in particular, asserted a position separate from the enlightenment movement and self-strengthening programs advocated by nationalist youth leaders.

In Taiwan, symbolic of this split was the change in leadership of the Taiwan Cultural

Association in 1927. In the early 1920s, a number of Taiwanese students, including Lian

Wenxing and Jiang Weishui, came into contact with Japanese socialist figures like Yamakawa

Hitoshi and Sakai Toshihiko. Others came to devote themselves to communism while studying in

China. A founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu met a Taiwanese student Xu

Naichang in Shanghai and helped him travel to Moscow as a Chinese citizen, for example.55

“Every year since the establishment of the Cultural Association, influences from the Chinese

Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Comintern activities, and anarchism and communism in Japan steadily grew in the enlightenment activities conducted by the Cultural

Association,” the colonial police recorded.56 After an internal power struggle among Lian

Wenxiang, Jiang Weishui, and Cai Peihuo in 1927, Lian came to represent the Cultural

Association and established communism as its goal. Jiang, Cai, and other previous leaders who did not embrace class struggle left the Association and formed the Taiwan Popular Party.57 The previous leaders denounced the leftist forces for their inflexible political orientation, referring

55 Taiwan sōtokufu keimu-kyoku, Taiwan shakai undōshi, 37-38, 583-585. 56 Ibid., 190. 57 For the details of the internal struggle, see Taiwan sōtokufu keimu-kyoku, Taiwan shakai undōshi, 182-216.

#78 again to the Meiji Restoration: “[In the Meiji Restoration,] merchants and masterless samurai allied with the nobles,” they argued, “these facts [of alliances] provide a good lesson for

Taiwan’s liberation activists to learn from.”58

In Korea, the split in the elite circles affected the national association of youth groups even earlier than in Taiwan. Frustration mounted because youth activism remained stagnant at the local levels. In March 1921, Tonga ilbo's editorial discussed that “observing the current status of each youth group, we see almost no activities or development, hearing (1) the difficulties in maintaining the group owing to the trouble in collecting membership fees and (2) the lack of projects and activities.”59 The national association also lost steam in the second year. Yi Kang, in retrospect, noted:

In order to write down activities between the first anniversary [of the Korea Youth Group Association] and the third general meeting in April 1922, I tried hard to dig up the material I have, and asked my friends who were committee members, but how pitiful, I did not find anything worth noting. If I have to write something, it would only be an increase in member youth groups and the four issues of the journal Asŏng... I cannot 60 !help but feel sad at how stagnant the youth movement in Korea was during this time. The harshest criticism came from the socialist youth who collaborated with nationalist leaders in establishing the Korea Youth Group Association. From the very beginning, they fought what they considered the “bourgeois” forces led by the Tonga ilbo group. Accusing them of corruption and lack of activism, the socialist youth attempted to oust their founding leaders, O

Sang-gŭn, Kim Myŏng-sik, and Chang Tŏk-su at their third regular meeting in April 1922. Once this no-confidence motion was voted down, the central Seoul Youth Group, now led by Kim Sa-

58 “Bunka kyōkai no ninmu,” Taiwan min bao, October 16, 1927, 10. 59 “Kakchi ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe e taehaya (sang),” Tonga ilbo, Mach 11, 1921. 60 Yi Kang, “Chōsen seinen undō no shiteki kōsatsu (4),” Chōsen shisō tsūshin 18, no. 472 (October 9, 1927): 5.

#79 guk, and those pursuing class struggle quit the Korea Youth Group Association altogether. They newly sponsored the All Korea Youth Party Convention (Chŏn Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏndang taehoe) with 74 youth groups in March 1923. This drastically changed the climate of youth politics. The remaining Korea Youth Group Association tried to address the increasingly heated issues of peasants and workers, but they could not stem the socialist tide created by the Seoul Youth

Group. In February 1924, the association decided to re-join the Seoul Youth Group and together formed the Korea Youth General Alliance [Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏn ch'ongdongmaeng].61 This time the leadership of the Seoul Youth Group, as well as the main goal of class struggle, became clear to everyone.

Korean youth, in comparison to their Taiwanese counterparts, had already shown a strong generational identity and antagonism toward “the old.” When the socialist youth groups gained momentum, they pushed the concerns about age to another level by introducing a new question—what is the age limit that defines “youth”? In Japan, the politics of age that unfolded in the “autonomy movement” was a development from the army’s intervention in setting the age limit of the seinendan. Youth in places like Shimoina county generated the new consciousness about the age and demanded that those over 25 years of age not intervene. In Korea, the question of age came from a greater distance. It reflected a debate developing among international

Communist leaders about whether youth should be in leadership positions as the vanguard of social revolution, or be subordinate to the Communist Party. When the theory of “youth as

61 Yi Kang, “Chōsen seinen undō no shiteki kōsatsu (1)-(15)” Chōsen shisō tsūshin 18 no. 469-484 (October 6-23, 1917); An 1993, 36-61; An Kŏn-ho, “1920-yŏndae chŏnban’gi Chosŏn ch'ŏngnyŏn undong ŭi chŏn’gae,” in Han’guk kŭnhyŏndae ch'ŏngnyŏn undongsa, ed. Hanguk yŏksa yŏn’guhŏe kŭnhyŏndae ch'ŏngnyŏn undongsa yŏn’guban (Seoul: P'ulpit, 1995), 69-79. There were several factions cooperating with and/or competing against each other among Korean socialists behind their negotiations with nationalists. On this point, see Pak Ch'ŏl-ha, “1920-yŏndae chŏnbangi sahŏejuǔi ŭi ch'ŏngnyŏn undong kwa Koryŏ kongsan ch'ŏngnyŏnhŏe,” Yŏksa wa hyŏnsil 9 (June 1993): 242-273.

#80 vanguard” subsided and the Party set the clear age limit for Komsomol membership at 16 - 23 years of age, leftist youth groups in Korea rushed to set age limits as well.62 The Korea Youth

General Alliance also introduced an age limit of 30, later changing it to 27.63

The strict age limit did not strengthen the power of youth leadership, however. From the beginning, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union had set the age limit in order to contain the power of youth. Leftist leaders in Seoul used it as a tool of power struggle in seeking recognition from international communist authorities. In some occasions, they attacked the Seoul Youth

Group as promoting vanguard-like youth groups that assumed too much leadership in all sectors, including workers, peasants, and women, against the decision of the Communist International.64

At other times, they criticized the Seoul Youth Group for not being progressive or young enough.

Pak Hyŏng-byŏng, a 30-year-old leader of the Korea Youth General Alliance, was condemned as

“the old president” by other committee members.65 In short, when socialist leaders imported the question of age from the outside world, the leadership subjected themselves to the volatile

62 The Koryŏ Communist Youth Alliance in exile set up an upper age limit to 30 years old. This group, established in Shanghai in 1921, exerted significant power over many of the Socialist youth groups operating in Korea with its status as a branch organization of the Communist Youth International. Pak Ch'ŏl-ha, 2“1920-yŏndae chŏnbangi sahŏejuǔi ŭi ch'ŏngnyŏn,” 49-252. 63 An Kŏn-ho and Pak Hyeran, “1920-yŏndae chunghuban ch'ŏngnyŏn undong kwa Chosŏn ch’ŏngnyŏn ch'ongdongmaeng,” in Hanguk kŭnhyŏndae ch'ŏngnyŏn undongsa, ed. Hanguk yŏksa yŏnguhŏe kŏnhyŏndae ch'ŏngnyŏn undongsa yŏn’guban (Seoul: P'ulpit, 1995), 98. Most restrictive was the Kyŏngsŏng Youth Group led by the Puksŏng Socialist group, which advocated 25 years old as the upper limit. “Once people turn over 25 years old, their activities become political... they could take advantage of the pure youth under 25 as much as they want, and trick these youth groups as they please,” claimed Song Pong-u, a leading figure of the Puksŏng group. He adopted a strict sense of “youth” defined by a physiological age, not by “youthful” qualities that older leaders claimed to have Song Pong-u, “Yŏllyŏng chehannon: isipose rul chuchang,” Ch'ŏkhudae Imsi-ho (July 5, 1924): 1, in Kee-hun Lee [Yi Ki-hun], “1920-yŏndae sahŏejuŭi inyŏm ŭi chŏn’gae wa ch'ŏngnyŏn damnon,” Yŏksa munje yŏn’gu 13, (December 2004): 305. 64 Pak, “1920-yŏndae chŏnbangi sahŏejuǔi ŭi ch'ŏngnyŏn,” 249-151. 65 This use of age as a weapon lost its appeal after this particular generation, however. Once the language of class struggle gained a dominant position in an anti-colonial discourse in the late 1920s, mentions of youth in leftist writings quickly diminished. Especially after the last attempt to unite the leftist and nationalist forces through the establishment of Singanhŏe took place in 1927, they could no longer describe the youth as warriors in the class struggle. Lee, “1920-yŏndae sahŏejuŭi inyŏm” 2004, 308-311.

#81 climate of global youth discourse at the same time.

At the local county level, the strict age limit served the goal of leftist youth better than it did for the central leadership. In the county capitals, conflicts between these youth and traditional elites were erupting everywhere. The socialist youth raised the question of age—youth group members ought to be young—as the first measure of “progressive reform” [hyŏksin]. Since youth groups were collaborative forums that linked the world of local officials, the traditional upper- class, and the newly educated, many groups allowed membership up to 40 years old, and even people older than that had a say in their activities.66 Leftist youth saw this as a source of the problems and deployed the age argument to remove interventions from unwelcome forces.

Around 1925, one youth group after another adopted a new age limit, mostly up to 30 years old, and replaced the original committee members.67 Through such progressive reforms, they attempted to shift the priority of their activities. In Chaenyŏng, for example, landed elites preferred investing resources in industry-stimulating projects whereas the socialist youth wanted to operate night study groups for illiterate peasants and women. Illiteracy was still a serious problem in rural life and the biggest obstacle to mass mobilization.68 Although the question of age was a double-edged sword for leadership circles in Seoul, setting the age limit allowed the country-level leftist youth to distinguish themselves from the older, more powerful traditional

66 An 1993, 70-71. 67 Some of the examples include “Kŭmhae ch'ŏngnyŏn hyŏksin,” Tonga ilbo, February 26, 1925; “Samsipse ro chehan hyŏksin ch'onghŏe esŏ hŏech’ikdo kaejŏnghae,” Tonga ilbo, March 12, 1925; “Kyŏngsŏng ch'ŏngnyŏn hyŏksin,” Tonga ilbo, April 2, 1925. 68 Tsuji, “Shokuminchiki jitsuryoku yōsei undo,” 93-96. The rate of schooling (public, private, and sŏdang) of all the school-age children in 1925 was 25%. That of the populations in the countryside and female children was significantly lower. This was calculated based on the numbers provided in Kim Puja, Shokuminchiki Chōsen no kyōiku to jendā (Tokyo: Seori shobō, 2005), 371. The national survey in 1930 estimated the literacy rate for the first time, and resulted that 80% of Korean populations were illiterate either in Korean or Japanese.

#82 upper class that did not share the goal of mobilizing the wider masses.

The Agrarian View of Nationalist and Socialist Youth

In Korea’s intense youth politics, local youth groups were valued not only as branches of their movements. At the turn of the 1930s, the countryside began to carry ideological importance in an effort to preserve national purity. Nationalist activists often celebrated the “national authenticity” represented by “rural youth, ” developing a similar position to the agrarian- nationalist ideals advocated by leaders in Japan. A student in the 1930s, Young Hook Kang, recalls the popular belief among nationalist leaders:

In those days, we were fond of reading novels such as Yi Kwang-su’s Hŭk, Yi Ki-yŏng’s Kohyang and Sim Hun’s Sangnoksu, etc. The major theme of these novels was the enlightenment movement in the countryside. The nationalist leaders in these days appeared to have believed in the possibility of maintaining our national identity and 69 !national spirit in the Korean farmers, whose lives had deep roots in Korean soil. The marriage between agrarian ideals and national roots was seen all over the world. Those who sought distinctive nationhood in colonized societies, in particular, found their “untouched” countryside the most attractive source of ethnic identity and an antithesis to the industrial power of the imperial rulers.70

Many leftist leaders fought the idealized view of countryside and shed light on the cruelty of colonial-capitalist exploitation of Korean peasants. Starting in the late 1920s, left-leaning literary authors and critics, such as Yi Sŏng-huan, Kim Do-hyŏn, Pek Chŏl, and Hong Hyo-min, repeatedly brought up the importance of involving the countryside in new literature. The debate

69 Young Hoon Kang, “Personal Reminiscences of my Japanese School Days,” in Korea’s Response to Japan: The Colonial Period 1910-1945, eds. Eugene Kim et al. (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1974), 288. 70 The agrarianism in literature in Japan and Korea were closely linked to each other as well as to international forces. Watanabe Naoki, “Shokuminchi Chōsen no puroretaria nōmin bungaku to Manshū,” Ilbon hakpo 74 (February 2008): 205-226 gives a glimpse of their links.

#83 developed in several theoretical directions—some assumed the enlightening role of literary works in guiding peasants, and others defined peasant literature as part of proletarian literature.

Facing the lack of literacy, they debated the challenge and mission of intellectual authors and fought the romanticized image of the countryside. Yet they shared with nationalist-agrarians the assumption that the future of Korean independence rested in the hands of peasant masses and in the rural countryside.71

The growing attention to rural areas stimulated other forces, particularly religious groups, to strengthen rural programs. A famous example of new rural activism was the Korea Farmers

Company [Chosŏn nongminsa] operating under the Chŏndogyo [Heavenly Way] Youth Party, which was also a member of the leftist Korea Youth Group General Alliance. They built cooperatives and provided night classes in rural villages.72 Articles to inspire youth in the countryside appeared in the 1920s in their periodicals, Farmers [Nongmin] and Korean Farmers

[Chosŏn Nongmin], as well as in Tonga ilbo and other newspapers.

These publications, although providing a way for intellectuals to convey their messages to rural youth, never became a forum for the uneducated agrarian youth themselves, however. “A letter sent to rural youth” in Kaebyŏk, another journal published by young Chŏndogyo activists explained that “I am not writing this letter in a desolate field or a boring rural village in which all you find is collapsing old houses like where the reader might live… The city I currently live in is the capital of Korea, and the center of modern culture in Korea.” After showing an understanding of the hardship of life in rural villages and excitement of urban centers, it argued, “cities flourish

71 For a quick survey of the peasant literature movement in the 1930s, see Ho Ung Jung [Chŏng Ho-ung], “Nongmin munhak yŏn’gu ŭi hyŏnkwang kwa apŭro wŭi panghyang,” Hanguk hakpo 10, no. 4 (1984): 4155-4187. 72 See Chu P'ong-no, “1920-yŏndae 'Chosŏn nongminsa' ŭi nongminsahoe kyoyukhwaldong e kwanhan yŏn’gu,” (PhD diss., Tan’guk University, 1990), 81-136.

#84 and develop by exploiting rural villages... [Becoming city people] means becoming an exploitative class... If you still want [to come to the city], I would like to rather discuss whether turning from an exploited class to an exploiting class really means the improvement of personality.”73 This author assumed the moral superiority of rural life, but reaffirmed that rural populations had no way out of their poverty.

Many articles on rural education targeted students who would visit their home villages over summer vacations. “Experience farming,” “observe the lives of lower-class people,” and

“try real labor,” was the advice for those students.74 The students were also encouraged to fight rural illiteracy by teaching rural youngster the Korean alphabets, but the summers were the busiest farming time of the year. Overall, these suggestions were meant to help students achieve a better understanding of rural life and develop wholesome personalities, not necessarily serve the goal of empowering farm youth. These articles could not conceal the gap between the elite activists and the majority of youth in rural villages—uneducated, poor, caught in family farming, and left outside the initiative of the youth movement.

In Taiwan, too, attraction to the countryside grew in the rhetoric of nationalist and leftist activism. The post-1927 Cultural Association decided to mention the development of “culture in farm villages” as the top priority in their activities.75 As in Korea, the most powerful imagination of the countryside among young intellectuals came from literary works. The new proletarian literature that described the rural backwardness and the colonial exploitation dominated the scene

73 Mokmyŏk Sanin, “Nongch'on ch'ŏngnyŏn-ege ponenŭn kŭlwol,” Kaebyŏk 6 no.1 (January 1925), 20-22. 74 These articles appeared almost in July almost every year in the 1920s. Some examples include “Hahyujung kuihyang hanŭn hakseng che’gun ege,” Kaebyŏk 5 no.7 (July 1924): 56-69 and “Hahyu e kuihyang hanŭn haksengdŭl ege,” Nongmin 1, no.3 (July 1930): 2-6. 75 Taiwan sōtokufu keimu-kyoku, Taiwan shakai undōshi, 199.

#85 —the most common themes included superstitious old people, opium-addicted youth, corrupt policemen, and exploitative landlords.76 The nativist literature movement widely shared the perception that the majority of the Taiwanese population were miserable farmers.

Despite various authors’ goals and efforts, the nativist literature in Taiwan produced more confusion than agreement on what constituted Taiwanese national origin. The issue of language was particularly complex, raising a number of issues, such as whether vernacular Mandarin was appropriate for Taiwanese readers and weather the use of the Holo (today called Taiwanese) language would separate Taiwan from mainland China.77 These questions never disappeared from the intellectual discourse and, particularly in the 1970s, became central in the second nativist literature debate. In addition to the issue of defining Taiwanese ethnic nation, leftist authors, like their Korean counterparts, faced a difficulty in filling the gap between their lives as intellectuals and the majority of rural farmers. A representative leftist writer in Taiwan, Yang

Kui, deplored that “[our works] cannot go beyond the circles of literature-loving youth. This proves that today’s New Literature and proletarian literature lack mass-ness. They exist merely as an ivory tower.”78

In short, although the concept of “rural youth” became important for both nationalist and socialist youth leaders in Korea and Taiwan, it did neither mitigate ideological differences nor bridge the gap between national leaders and youth in the countryside. The local youth groups

76 For more details, see Chen Nanhong, “Ri zhi shi qi nong min xiao shuo zhong di jing ying zhu yi yu nong min xing xiang (1926-1937)” (MA thesis, National Cheng Kung University, 2007); Zhang Huiqi, “Ri zhi shi qi Taiwan nong cun xiao shuo yan jiu” (MA thesis, National Chung Cheng University, 2008). 77 See Huang Qichun, “Ri zhi shi qi she hui zhu yi si chao xia zhi xiang tu wen xue lun zheng yu Taiwan hua wen yun dong,” Zhong wai wen xue (February 1995): 56–74. For the most comprehensive account on the first debate on nativist literature, see Yokoji, Wen xue de liu li yu hui gui. 78 Yang Kui, “Bunpyōshō shinsa iin shoshi ni atau” Bungaku hyōron 3, no.3 (March 1936) in Chen Nanhong, 45.

#86 mainly spread provincial capitals and towns, but hardly in remote villages. Despite the effort of intellectual youth, they did not establish the mutual communicational sphere with youth in the countryside, most of whom were illiterate and did not have access even to local youth groups or youth journals. Not being able to align with youth in rural villages, students started to blame the farmers as immoral and irrational in the 1930s. Young Hoon Kang, the Korean student who had embraced nationalist-agrarian ideals earlier, expressed in his memoir:

As time passed, we had to acknowledge the crude fact that farmers and countryside were not a repository of national spirit and conscience as some national leaders had hoped. As long as their lives were not threatened and the social order maintained, they seemed rather indifferent to the nature of their leadership. In my observation, the Korean farmers were so amenable that they had no difficulty in adapting themselves to Japanese rule. Thus, I was driven to despair by thoughts of the possibility of losing our national 79 !identity forever. Advocacy of Colonial Governments

The colonial governments in Taiwan and Korea did not remain silent in the face of agrarian ideas and youth groups sprouting in their territory. In fact, colonial authorities actively participated in shaping youth discourse and agrarianism among urban elites. For the goal of formulating the image of “rural youth” as pillars of modern society, anti-colonial forces and colonial officials were in an unintended collaborative relationship, and their political rivalry accelerated rural youth mobilization. The rural youth programs of colonial bureaucracies, with greater institutional resources, stepped into the gap between anti-colonial intellectuals and rural population.

The experiences of the Japanese seinendan naturally determined the directions of youth- centered agrarian ideals advocated by colonial officials. In October 1926, the Government-

79 Kang, “Personal Reminiscences of my Japanese School Days,” 288.

#87 General of Taiwan established a bureau of education [bunkyō-kyoku], a new office dedicated to the education and moral suasion of Taiwanese youth—“social education,” a recent trend in

Japan, was named the central task of the bureau.80 The new Vice Governor-General, Gotō Fumio, designed many of the bureau’s programs. In Japan, Gotō was known as a top leader of seinendan associations. Holding an executive position in the national seinendan bureaucracy, he emphasized the importance of centralizing youth education.81 The years 1926 and 1927 saw many government surveys and studies on local youth groups, women’s groups, and other community organizations that encouraged agricultural and neighborhood cooperation.82 Gotō also increased the number of local officials specializing in educational affairs, invited Japanese seinendan leaders like Tazawa Yoshiharu to Taiwan, and suppressed activities of the Taiwan

Cultural Association and Taiwan minbao.83

Together with the bureau, the Taiwan Education Association, as well as various moral suasion [kyōka] groups and shūyōdan (Moral Training) groups that spread at provincial and county-levels, played a large role in promoting the emphasis on “rural youth.” They published teaching materials that highlighted the power of youth and the countryside, importing the ideas publicized by seinendan leaders in Tokyo. “If nature is our god, those who are embraced, cared by, and given the most benefits from that god are people in rural villages,” a common saying of

80 On bunkyō-kyoku, see Chen Wen Sung (Winston) [Chen Wensong], “Seinen no sōdatsu: 1920-nendai shokuminchi Taiwan ni okeru seinen kyōka undō–bunkyō-kyoku setsuritsu o chūshin ni shite” (MA thesis, University of Tokyo, 2000). 81 See Mori Ariyoshi, Seinen to ayumu Gotō Fumio (Tokyo: Nihon seinenkan, 1979) for Gotō’s involvement in seinendan associations. 82 For example, Taiwan sōtokufu naimu-kyoku bunkyō-ka, Zentō seinenkai sonota shakai kyōka teki dantai (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1926). Taiwan sōtokufu bunkyō-kyoku, Zentō seinendan, shojokai, kachōkai, shufukai shirabe, (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1926). 83 Chen Wen Sung, “Seinen no sōdatsu,” 38-43, 45-51.

#88 Japanese agrarianism was often repeated in “youth readings” distributed by these offices.84 The colonial effort to standardize agrarian youth groups steadily progressed over the course of the

1920s and 30s. In 1930, when kyōka (moral suasion) reached its peak importance in the governance of Taiwan, the GGT officially issued an act to centralize youth groups throughout the island, which ushered a new phase in village politics.85

In Korea, the clear continuity from the March First Movement to local youth groups alarmed colonial officials who were concerned about their political intents. Almost simultaneously with Japan, the colonial government in Korea planned workshops and programs of “social education,” targeting local youth group members in the early 1920s.86 In 1922, for instance, when the Ministry of Education conducted a survey on “the situation of social education centering on schools” in thirteen prefectures in Japan, the GGK collected the same surveys from local offices in Korea.87 Many programs it offered emphasized a sense of community spirit to distract youth from political opposition. In South Chŏlla province, officials invited 46 youth group leaders to a five-day “Youth Moral Training Lectures” [seinen shūyō kōenkai] in November 1921, offering lectures on “the Basic Principles of the Cultural Rule,”

“Current Affairs of Youth Groups in Japan,” “Finances in Rural Villages,” and “Responsibilities of Local Youth,” and showing motion pictures on the local improvement activities in the

84 Taihoku-shū rengō Dōfū-kai, Gendai seinen dokuhon: nōson no kan jō, (Taipei: Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, 1926), 14. 85 Chen Wen Sung, “Seinen no sōdatsu,” 54-55. Miyazaki Seiko, Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan to chiiki no henyō (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 2008), 144-163. 86 One example of the emphasis on societal education and moral suasion is Matsumura Matsumori, “Gakkō o chūshin tosuru shakai kyōka,” Chōsen (June 1921): 99-104. 87 Kasama Kenji, Chihō kairyō undōki ni okeru shōgakkō to chiiki shakai (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2003), 11-12. Examples in Korea include: Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku, Gakkō o chūshin tosuru shakai kyōiku jōkyō (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1922).

#89 province.88 The GGK also selected about 30 youth group leaders from each province and paid for their trips to visit model youth groups in Japan. The officials reported with satisfaction that many of the participants were impressed by the passionate lecturers and achievements of the Japanese seinendan.89

The emphasis on agrarianism intensified when the GGK promoted a program called

“model graduate guidance” in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. Each elementary school chose

“training-worthy” graduates from farming families and made them the visible symbol of “rural youth.”90 Throughout the 1930s, when the colonial measures to counter rural poverty developed during the depression, the GGK further integrated “model rural youth” into agricultural cooperatives and kyōka campaigns. As we will see in later chapters, these programs elevated the discourse and power of “rural youth” in similar ways the seinendan movement did in Japan in the 1910s and 20s.

Conclusion

“Rural youth” became a powerful social construct in colonial Taiwan and Korea by the late 1920s. Colonial intellectual youth attempted to create a rural basis for their own nation- building by aligning with youth in the countryside. Japan’s seinendan network was a model to emulate for these leaders. In generating the youth and agrarianist discourses, however, they found themselves subject to an intense interplay of transnational influences. Japan, China, the

Soviet Union, and the Western powers inspired them with political ideologies and provided them

88 Zenra-nando naimu-bu, Seinenkai shidō hōshin, 5-6. 89 Ibid., 5-11. Chōsen sōtokufu naimu-kyoku shakai-ka. Chōsen shakai jigyō yōran (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1923), 184-185. 90 See Tomita Akiko, “Nōson shinkō undōka no chūken jinbutsu no yōsei,” Chōsenshi kenkyūkai ronbunshū 18 (March 1981): 148-173 and Chapter 7 of this dissertation.

#90 with institutional support. These transnational forces in turn produced splits and confrontations among anti-colonial elites in Taipei and Seoul. Unlike in the Japanese seinendan, which grew by absorbing conflicting interests in defining the role of “rural youth,” the similar goal of creating the ideal “rural youth” did not help anti-colonial leaders overcome their differences in vision.

The biggest challenge for the anti-colonial youth activism was the gap between highly educated youth and illiterate rural farmers. Students increasingly felt frustrations towards farm youth, while farm youth remained neglected in youth politics in Taipei and Seoul. Agrarian youth lived in more intricate webs of social relations than the elites imagined. Their envy of and grudge against urban elites constituted one of the motivations for agrarian youth to support colonial programs. This gap made it easier for Japanese officials and teachers to operate in the colonial countryside. With their institutional resources and experience in seinendan mobilization, colonial youth educators capitalized on the psychology of youth in rural villages.

#91 ! ! ! ! ! Chapter 3: The “Rural Youth Industry” in Shida Village, Miyagi (1900s-1920s) !

At the turn of the twentieth century, Japanese national leaders viewed Japan through multiple lenses. Japan was a recently centralized nation-state lagging behind the Western powers, a new empire in East Asia, and a potential liberator of non-White colonized peoples. Focusing on a small village in northern Japan, Shida in Miyagi prefecture shows how politics was even more multi-layered. Japan’s imperial expansion, its state policy boosting rice production, and Miyagi’s position as a regional leader in the often marginalized northeastern prefectures (Tōhoku region) generated a mix of hope, pride, self-designation, and feelings of both superiority and inferiority in the minds of local leaders. State officials and intellectuals discussed “rural villages” as if all had shared the same experience and status. But the self-images of rural residents, even in the same region, varied depending on the location and industry of the village, class, generations, gender, and many other elements.1

Influenced by national policies and discourses but operating within specific local settings, the village youth associations [seinendan] in Shida went through major changes between the

1 Historians have provided local perspectives on Japan’s nation-building focusing on different regions. See Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000); Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Martin Dusinberre, Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012).

#92 1900s and 1920s. Their transformation primarily mirrored the changing role and status of local landlords. The early youth groups in Shida operated under the strong initiatives of landed leaders who attempted to modernize labor relations and agricultural methods. But after World War I, with the rising importance of young men for national mobilization, the youth groups gained more leverage against the established authorities. The example of an elite rural youth, Katō Einojō, and his private youth group called the 4-H club, embodied the simultaneously conservative and rebellious characteristics that defined the groups led by privileged youth.

Parallel to the development of Katō’s group was the emergence of what I call the “Rural

Youth Industry” for average farm youth. Youth training centers, built by the army in 1926, created new employment opportunities for agrarian youth and turned the “model rural youth” into a possible career. Overlapping with the expansive discursive space of the seinendan network, these job opportunities transformed seinendan members from perpetual farmers to success-oriented career seekers. With this mechanism of social mobility, young men in the countryside could confront the older generations and landlord-centered village system from a very different standpoint in the 1920s from before.

The purpose of presenting the seinendan history of a village in Japan before colonial villages is to show, even in Japan, that young men in the countryside adopted and internalized the rhetoric of Japanese nationalism not because they were attracted and convinced by the Emperor- centered ideology, but because it helped them overcome their marginalized positions and to assert moral authority over intellectuals, urban youth, and older generations. Nation-building through rural youth mobilization depended on the simultaneous development of the regional identity as “rural” and the generational identity as “youth.” The Rural Youth Industry shows how

#93 their pragmatic and emotional incentives were intertwined with the spread of Japanese agrarian nationalism.

Shida Village, Miyagi, and Tōhoku in Modern Japan

Although remote rural villages evoke an image of old, conservative forces resistant to change, they were as much the products of modern governance as were the cities. Shida village came to life as a community only after modern centralized rule reached the countryside. In the local government system structured in 1888-9, the Miyagi prefectural government amalgamated thirteen hamlets between and adjacent to two small rivers, Shibui River in the north and Tada

River in the south, creating the new administrative village of Shida. It was located at the northeast edge of Shida county, 28 miles (45 km) north of prefectural capital, Sendai. From

1889, the village head, village administrative office, and the electoral village assembly governed

Shida until it was absorbed into Furukawa city in 1950.2

Shida was often labeled a typical “pure farm village.” Geographically, the village was mostly flat with good access to water and transportation thanks to the Tada River. Its population grew from 505 households and 4,428 residents in 1888 to 1,145 households and 7,710 residents in 1950.3 More than 80% of the villagers engaged in rice production. As of 1950, rice paddies stretched over 70% of the total land (with 7% of its fields planted in vegetables).4 The northern half of Miyagi prefecture (called Senhoku) was, and still is, one of the major rice producing

2 Furukawa city became a part of bigger Ōsaki city in 2005. These merges are typical to remote areas with shrinking populations in today’s Japan. 3 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi (Miyagi: Miyagi-ken Shida-gun Shida-son, 1950), 44-46. 4 Nōrin chūō kinko kikakubu, Nōson jittai chōsa shiryō dai-2 shū: Miyagi-ken Shida-gun Shida-son (unpublished, available at Tōhoku University library, estimate 1948), 22. Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, 2.

#94 centers in Japan. But even relative to other areas of the prefecture, Shida village’s industry and landscape were markedly rice-centered.

Nearly all the major historical changes in Shida village were shaped by efforts to maximize rice production. The region had been producing rice as a main export product to Edo

(current Tokyo) even before the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868, but that did not mean that it was destined to become a large production center in the modern era. It was only after the Meiji state, with the 1873 land tax law, began to collect taxes from uncultivated land that land-owners became keen to use every square measure of land.5 Miyagi-brand rice became “a pronoun for coarse and bad rice,” the staple food for lower-class urban populations during the Meiji period.6

This was partly because natural disasters, particularly cold weather and floods, often affected the harvest. Shida village experienced famine frequently—1869, 1875, 1876, 1879, 1886 1888,

1889, 1890, 1902, 1905, 1910, 1913, and 1914.7 The low quality of rice was also due to the lack of good drying techniques, which caused rice quality to deteriorate rapidly in transport.8 Owing to these problems, Nitobe Inazō, a prominent agricultural economist, argued that the northern part of Japan was not suitable for cultivating rice.9 Yet new agricultural policies demanded that northern prefectures concentrate on rice production from the 1890s.10 The process of overcoming these obstacles to support the goal of fukoku kyōhei (“enrich the country, strengthen the

5 Sunaga Shigemitsu, ed., Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin: suitō tansaku nōgyō no keizaigakuteki kenkyū, Nangō- mura (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 1966), 35-37. 6 Ibid., 192-197. 7 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi,143-154. 8 Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin, 192-197. 9 Hangai Seiju, Shōrai no Tohoku (Tokyo: Maruyamasha shosekibu, 1906), foreword 1-4. 10 Nakamura Kichiji ed., Miyagi-ken nōmin undōshi I (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1982), 147.

#95 military”) lay at the heart of landlord-tenant relationships, the expansion of (agricultural) education, and the spread of youth training institutions in this area.

Political leaders in the Tōhoku region often harbored a feeling of inferiority as the nation marched toward modernization. The establishment of the Meiji state in 1868 and rapid nation- and empire-building only highlighted the misery of the region. Tōhoku was on the wrong side during the Boshin War, a civil war in which new forces aiming to dismantle the Tokugawa shogunate and build an Emperor-centered polity defeated the opposition in 1868-9. Tōhoku (in an alliance called Ōu reppan rengō) fought what would become the national army, led by the

“Seinan (southwest)” forces of the Satsuma and Chōshū domains.11 Even in recent popular tellings of the Meiji Restoration, Tōhoku represents the conservative, ignorant, and stubborn forces that did not appreciate the efforts of the founding fathers of the Meiji state. After the defeat, the domains of the region were dissolved and virtually colonized by the new centralized state. Many among the samurai-bureaucrat class had no choice but migrate to Hokkaidō as agricultural settlers. Those more fortunate became land-holding farmers at home, and Shida and its surrounding villages had a number of these former-samurai landholders. “Despite the fact that those who were called ‘rebels’ in the Seinan War [1877] now receive preferential treatment, the

‘rebels’ in the Tōhoku war had not had their names cleared even today… Nothing is more telling than this single fact,” Sugawara Michiyoshi, a politician from Sendai, deplored as late as 1933.12

The memory of the Boshin War and Tōhoku’s low status in Meiji politics haunted Tōhoku intellectuals for decades.

11 Miyagi kengikaishi hensan iinkai, Miyagi kengikaishi dai-1 kan (Sendai: Miyagi kengikai, 1968), 1-14. 12 Sugawara Michiyoshi, “Tōhoku fushin ni taisuru konpon hōsaku,” Miyagi kenjin 9:10 [100-go kinen: Miyagi-ken no zenbō] (October 1933), 1-5.

#96 Even the celebratory year of Japan’s victory against Russia, 1905, was a time of devastation for the Tōhoku region, making local intellectuals resentful of the new empire. It was struck by a series of unusual weather patterns—a warm winter, cold spring, snowfall in May, followed by harsh summer heat, continuous rain, and early frost in September. This severely damaged the crops and caused famine in the region. Shida county exported 46,200 koku of rice outside the region in previous years, but in 1905, it only produced 8,790 koku, not enough to feed the county’s residents even for a few months.13 Hangai Seiju, an intellectual from Fukushima, the main source of “rebels” in the Boshin War, expressed his anger at the abandonment of the region in his 1906 book, Tōhoku of the Future. He and other commentators argued that Tōhoku should become the industrial center of the nation, and the southern prefectures should focus on agricultural productions, taking advantage of their geographical condition. Hangai was most upset by the direction of expansion of the Japanese empire. “Rather than the exploration of

Hokkaidō, the management of Taiwan, or intervention into Korea, the recovery of Tōhoku should be the first priority,” he argued. He viewed the expansion of the empire in terms of a competition between southwestern prefectures, particularly Osaka, and northeastern ones, including Tokyo:

We see our territory expanding towards the southwest… Would not this cause the national forces of Japan also to develop southward, and at the same time, the power of Japanese society to be transferred to the south, and the economic center to be also monopolized by the south?… These trends until today produced events that increased the power of Osaka. In other words, Taiwan joining our territorial map, Korea becoming our protectorate, and Manchuria entering our sphere of influence, all of these were nothing but changes that enhanced Osaka’s power… Tokyo should do everything to expand its power and maintain its political status. This is not the policy for Tokyo alone, 14 !but also Tokyo’s responsibility for the nation.

13 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 146-147. 14 Hangai, Shōrai no Tohoku, 10-11.

#97 Resentment against the southwest-centric development was not the only reaction of

Tōhoku people. They also reflected on their own faults and embraced many of the backward images attached to them. “Laziness” was the feature most commonly pointed out, even by Hara

Takashi, the future prime minister first elected to office in Miyagi.15 The Miyagi Educators

Journal often discussed the problematic characteristics of Tōhoku people. One teacher listed 25 of them: lacking time consciousness, ignorance of the sacredness of physical labor, lacking a spirit of cooperation, poor in public morals, finding little value in trust, having wasteful customs, lacking the spirit of self-rule, and so on.16 These features resembled many descriptions by

Japanese colonizers of the people of Korea and Taiwan.

Miyagi residents developed a dual self-image, positioning themselves at the center and periphery of politics at the same time. Miyagi, of the six prefectures in Tōhoku, did not recognize itself solely as a marginalized periphery. Its people often expressed great pride in Miyagi as the cultural and historical center of Tōhoku. The Mutsu Sendai domain had been the third largest in the country during the Tokugawa period, and its founder, Date Masamune, was a legendary military hero of the late sixteenth century. “This prefecture has been a place renowned for its education,” so did an official in the Ministry of Education praise Miyagi’s special status in

Japanese history. The centrality of Miyagi in Tōhoku was self-evident in his view that “to the extent that when we hear Tōhoku, we think Sendai, and when we hear Sendai, we think

Tōhoku.”17 In the name of Date Masamune, they were also proud of the reputation of the Sendai

15 Ibid., foreword 15-17. 16 Go Chō sei, “Honken ni okeru shōgaku jidō no tokusei kanyō jō tokuni chūi subeki jikō narabini korega tekisetsu naru shisetsu hōhō ikan,” Miyagi-ken kyōikukai zasshi (March 1913): 11-12. 17 Tadokoro Yoshiharu, “Miyagi-ken no kyōiku ni taisuru kibō,” Miyagi-ken kyōikukai zasshi (August 1911): 9.

#98 division as one of the strongest in the army. This recognition of Miyagi as the center of Tōhoku created an identity gap between it and the rest of Tōhoku. In a way, the duality of marginalization and centrality in Miyagi resembled what farm youth were experiencing in Meiji: a simultaneous embrace of rural backwardness and a progressive role as pillars of village reform. With these mixed feelings, both Miyagi’s leaders and agrarian youth attempted to break out their geographical constraints and place themselves in a larger framework of imperial Japan. “Miyagi prefecture should not remain in the position of ‘Tōhoku’s Miyagi prefecture,’” another author in

Miyagi Educators Journal argued, “[it is,] indeed, ‘a Miyagi prefecture of the Greater Japanese

Empire.’”18

The Elementary School Youth Group Under Landlord-led Reforms

The year 1905 was a key moment for farm youth in Miyagi and around the country. The simultaneous occurrence of the Russo-Japanese War and a large-scale famine brought a notable change in the villages of Tōhoku. The Miyagi prefectural government issued an act to promote youth groups in 1906 in the hope of supporting the military and restoring rural economies.19

Inspired by Yamamoto Takinosuke’s call for revitalizing rural youth groups, advocates of youth groups exalted the leadership of youth and the autonomy of youth groups. In reality, young generations in villages gained neither. Rather, they were integrated into the new landlord-led reforms.

The modernization of the military and a major war triggered a surge of new youth groups in the countryside of the first decade of the twentieth century. Miyagi witnessed an expansion of

18 Shōdenshi, “Honken niokeru shōgaku jidō no tokusei kanyōjō tokuni chūi subeki jikō narabini korega tekisetsunaru shisetsu hōhō,” Miyagi-ken kyōikukai zasshi 191 (February 1913): 1. 19 Kasama Kenji, Chihō kairyōki ni okeru shōgakkō to chiiki shakai (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2003), 85.

#99 various youth organizations —(elementary) school graduate groups, youth clubs, and night study groups—as the Russo-Japanese War unfolded. Youth gatherings and night study groups had existed even before the war, but in the prefectural report written in 1905, the officials noted that the nature of these youth groups had shifted. Wartime youth groups sent off the conscripted soldiers and welcomed the returnees, provided manual labor to the families who lost men in the military, helped the illiterate families exchange letters with their fathers and sons in the battlefield, and organized collective funerals for the war dead. These youth groups had already been preparing the members for the conscription exam, but becoming successful conscripts now moved to the forefront of their goals.20 The increasing attention to conscription derived from the war victory, which raised popular confidence in Japan’s military power. The establishment of local army reservist associations in 1906 consolidated the presence of the army in local affairs as well.21 At the same time, newspapers regularly reported “unpatriotic” incidents and “those with sunken spirits” in the military.22 Many youth deliberately evaded conscription—officials counted that 89 young men in Shida county’s registry somehow disappeared.23 During battle operations, soldiers rebelled against their superiors, generals “shamelessly” surrendered when their subordinates were being killed, and officers committed suicide.24 The news reports on these incidents concluded that the government needed soldiers of better quality.

20 Miyagi-ken gakumu zatsuji, “Sengo to kyōiku,” file M38 2-0026, Miyagi-ken kōbunshokan. 21 Shida village established a reservist group in 1910. 22 “Guntai no seishin,” Kahoku shinpō, July 29, 1906, 1. 23 “Chōhei shobun o ukezaru mono,” Kahoku shinpō, December 19, 1907, 2. 24 “Guntai no seishin,” Kahoku shinpō, July 29, 1906, 1.

#100 Behind the repeated calls for reliable soldiers was a larger need for strong farm youth who could restore rural economies. The Local Improvement Movement was thus launched by the

Home Ministry immediately after the Russo-Japanese War. Throughout the country, the movement relied heavily on initiatives of elementary schoolteachers. The “Shida elementary school youth group” in Shida village was one of many examples of how teachers implemented the Local Improvement Movement by guiding young farmers. The principal Mikami Hajime re- organized a graduates’ study group into this new “youth group” in 1905 specifically to nurture

“the spirit of hard work and thrift.” During the famines, Mikami worried, “the ownership of [the rice fields] flowed out of village hands every year, and outside ownership reached almost more than thirty percent [of the total farms].” This was caused by “the weak spirit of hard work and the lack of knowledge of agricultural reform.” With Mikami as the head of the youth group, schoolteachers as directors, and local notables as accountants, the youth group adopted the moral teachings of the Hōtokukai (Society of Repaying Virtue) and educated 54 graduates of the elementary school in that year.25

Agriculture and academic studies were two pillars of their activities. The members cultivated 40,000 m2 of rice paddies and 10,000 m2 of vegetable fields to create their collective property. After the first year, they deposited 50 yen of profits for future use. The participants also created a pool of money for night classes to buy books, paper, ink, and oil lamps by selling straw products that they made together over 20 days of group gatherings. Night classes were offered between October 15 and December 24, when farming was off-season. The youth were divided into three levels and studied reading, composition, shūyō (moral training, self-cultivation),

25 “Shida shōgakkō seinendan,” Miyagi-ken kyōikukai zasshi 148 (December 1908), 47-50.

#101 abacus arithmetic, and agriculture. For those who would soon take the conscription exam, the teachers offered two months of intensive sessions to study Japanese, math, and the “handbook for new conscripts.”26

Award ceremonies were important occasions for boosting awareness of the kyōka (moral suasion) campaign. In Shida, Kadowaki Chōshirō became an exemplary awardee in 1907. A twenty-year-old farmer at the time of the award, Kadowaki had lost his parents when he was nine and could not even afford to finish the upper-level years of elementary school. When his grandfather fell ill as a migrant worker in Iwate, Kadowaki traveled to bring him home and take care of him. “Studying hard, farming diligently, and contributing a lot to youth group activities,”

Kadowaki became a model of the agrarian campaign.27 The Shida elementary school youth group as a whole was honored by the Miyagi Governor in 1909 for contributing to the improvement of education and customs.28

Village notables exercised significant influence in the initiative of the elementary school.

The village administration, consisting of well-off landed families, built and managed the school as an engine of modernization.29 Schools produced national subjects even in remote villages—

26 Ibid. 27 “Seinen no mohan,” Miyagi-ken kyōikukai zasshi 134 (October 1907), 47-48. 28 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, 265. 29 Since before the end of the Tokugawa period, land in rural villages in Miyagi had been accumulated in hands of a small number of landlords. Many traditional landlords collapsed owing to the financial burdens of the Boshin War as well. The heavy land taxes in Meiji, 1880s deflation, and repeating natural disasters turned many self-cultivating small farmers into tenants. Many tenants also abandoned their land completely during the first four decades of Meiji. See Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin, 55-56. In Shida, between 1890 and 1911, the number of landless peasants increased from 103 to 381. The lost land was absorbed by local moneylenders (or the landlord class). In 1907, Shida village produced a landlord who owned more than 50 ha (nearly 500,000m2). By the following year, there were four of them. Considering that the maximum amount of land that one family could cultivate by themselves was 6-7 ha, the owner of 50 ha of land depended heavily on tenant farmers. See Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, 17, and Sunaga, 162.

#102 most importantly, they taught the standardized Japanese language.30 The physical presence of the

Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890, usually enshrined in a designated place in school, symbolized the direct connection between the school and the national authenticity embodied by the Emperor. Established as an attachment to the elementary school, the youth group also shouldered the modernization effort of village notables.

In a way, the youth group was more immediate an interest to the landed notables than the elementary school was because the youth group was a useful tool for them in transitioning from traditional to modern landlordship.31 The 1870s goal to “enrich the country, strengthen the military” created the need for abundant rice that cheap labor could afford.32 To respond to this national need, the landlords enforced agricultural innovation while reducing their financial burden. The youth group disguised their forceful measures of reform and provided free labor. In the name of “financial independence through cooperative cultivation,” the youth group re- cultivated abandoned land and became a collective tenant for the village administrative office.33

The creation of “common land,” a widely seen phenomenon between the 1880s and the 1910s, began in the land reform intended to rescue poverty-stricken tenant farmers by providing jobs.34

The tenants created new rice fields that became the public property of hamlets. Soon the village administration office centralized the hamlet-owned fields and rented them to tenants with written

30 See Hijikata Sonoko, Kindai Nihon no gakkō to chiiki shakai: mura no kodomo wa dō ikita ka (Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai, 1994) on how school education became the central focus of village administration in Meiji. Hijikata, 54. 31 The village administrative office was nothing more than a federation of hamlets at the beginning. But the modern administrative responsibility assigned to the landlords provided with them a legal back-up of their dominance as well as a larger scale of land management. Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin, 64-70. 32 Nakamura, Miyagi-ken nōmin undōshi, 205. 33 “Seinen dantai” in Miyagi-ken gakumu zatsuji, “Sengo to kyōiku,” file M38 2-0026, Miyagi-ken kōbunshokan 34 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 22-31.

#103 contracts. The profits created, usually deposited in the village credit union, went into public investments, such as education and infrastructure. This successfully transferred the responsibilities previously fulfilled by the landlords in a private capacity to the village administration while guaranteeing continued dominance of the landlords.35 The youth groups in

Shida were a microcosm of this transition. Encouraged to create and cultivate the “common land” and to deposit the profits in the credit union, they helped to reduce the burden of the growing landlords.36 In fact, the achievement of youth groups was assessed by the size of land they cultivated and the amount of deposits they made in the initial decade. Shida county’s 1912 summary of county affairs showed only the area of land, membership, deposits of each youth group, saying nothing about their night classes or conscription success rate.37

The youth group also assisted the landlords in introducing new agricultural methods.

Landlords formed a local branch of the national Agricultural Association [nōkai] to promote new technologies, such as new varieties of rice and organic fertilizer. “Kame no o” became the most popular breed in Tōhoku since it grew fast, resisted the cold, and could tolerate a large amount of fertilizer. But adopting new kinds of rice and changing the familiar methods of cultivation often met resistance from farmers. For them, trying a new method was a life-or-death gamble. To enforce agricultural reforms, the Agricultural Association in Miyagi depended on police coercion

35 The cooperative cultivation itself was not new to hamlets. It was a usual measure to take in times of famine. But in the contract-based tenancy of common land, peasants were forced to produce rice for commercial use, not for self-use to directly alleviate their hunger. It also accelerated the rice-centric agriculture and commercialization of rice, rather than diversifying products to reduce famine risks. For the detail of the Meiji land reform in Miyagi villages and the complex character of the village-owned common land, see Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin, 201-208 and 282-302. 36 “Chihō zasshin, shida-gun,” Kahoku shinpō, February 5, 1911, 3. 37 Miyagi-ken Shida gunyakusho, Dai 5-kai Meiji 43-nen Miyagi-ken Shida gunchi ippan, (Miyagi: Shida gunyakusho, 1912) 46.

#104 and penalties. The use of coercion at sword point, called “saber agricultural governance,” made clear that landlords exercised all sorts of power to promote the agricultural reforms.38 To align with this effort, the Shida elementary school youth group used a part of their fields for experimental agriculture to test new seeds and fertilizer.39 In contrast to raw coercion, the youth group lent a positive and progressive image to the adoption of new agricultural methods.

In short, in the eyes of modern landlords, the Shida elementary school youth group represented the model tenant farmer. They were supposed to acquire the “virtue of hard work” through collective cultivation of common land and an “innovative spirit” from new agricultural methods. The part played by youth groups in landlord-led reforms never surfaced in the discourse on rural youth training. Activists who promoted local youth groups only emphasized the educational effect of disciplining youth. Tomeoka Kōsuke, a founder of a famous farming school, argued in the Miyagi Education Journal that youth groups were useful in providing continuing education, implanting the concept of time, and providing leisure to rural youth, but failed to discuss the youth’s relationship to the local landlords.40 When the nation faced both the external pressures of a world of imperial powers and the internal need to restore rural economies, activists and government officials tacitly or openly encouraged the landlords’ commitment to modernizing agriculture. Their use of youth groups for this purpose was commonly accepted, if not publicly endorsed.

38 Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin, 9-10. 39 “Shida shōgakkō seinendan,” Miyagi-ken kyōikukai zasshi 148 (December 1908), 49-50. 40 Tomeoka Kōsuke, “Seinen dantai no seishin teki kiso,” Miyagi-ken kyōiku zasshi 118, (December 1911): 49-50.

#105 Transforming Hamlet Youth Associations

In 1905, the year of the establishment of the Shida elementary school youth group, the village administrative office organized another youth group, the “Shida village youth group.” In contrast to Mikami’s group, which gathered select youth, the village youth group absorbed traditional all-in youth associations of the hamlets. Their activities overlapped with the elementary school youth group, including night classes and common land cultivation.41 The elementary school youth group had a more modern face, symbolizing the new administrative village unit, whereas the village youth group preserved continuities from the disestablished but traditional hamlets.

During the Local Improvement Movement, the advocates of youth groups emphasized the novelty of the youth groups that emerged in the post-Russo-Japanese War era. The break from the previous youth groups was important to them because what they often had in mind was the student groups prevalent in urban areas during the 1890s. These groups were inspired by

Tokutomi Sohō’s call for youth as an engine of the modern nation. They imitated Tokutomi’s The

Nation’s Friend and published essays, stories, and poems in their journals. They held lectures and public speeches to spread enlightenment thought. In Miyagi, the Fudōdō village youth group and the Hoppo youth group exemplified this trend of the 1890s. Both were exclusive to elite youth— the former consisted of sons of upper-class families, and the latter required two internal references to join the group.42 These youth groups in Miyagi attested that Tokutomi’s influence

41 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 266. 42 Utsumi Teitarō, ed., Miyagi-ken seinen kyōiku no ayumi (Sendai: Miyagi-ken kyōiku iinkai, 1987), 49-50.

#106 reached Miyagi’s remote areas, but also that this movement was strictly confined to elite educated youth.

The pre-Meiji form of youth associations, too, was a concern to new youth group advocates. Yet, these associations were more deeply integrated in local society and did not disappear. Ethnographer Takeuchi Toshimi argued that the youth groups led by Meiji village offices were modeled after traditions in the Southwest region and did not fit the reality of

Tōhoku: The Southwest village youth groups emphasized horizontal ties whereas Tōhoku’s village communities were organized more hierarchically.43 Fukutake Tadashi agrees that

Tōhoku’s hamlet organizations evolved around the vertical hierarchy with the hamlet landlord

(the main family “honke”) as the top and its branch tenant families beneath it, resembling a kind of clan-based community.44 These branch tenant farmers governed themselves through multiple guild associations [keiyaku kō]. A local historian Gotō Ichizō, in his fieldwork on various forms of guild associations, argued that they were “the supreme decision-making institution of each hamlet.” Their agreements were the iron law of mutual support in every aspect of community life

—marriage, funeral, irrigation, harvesting, education, festivals, and so on—and being excluded from them meant ostracism from the community.45 Age and gender associations in the hamlets were organized to support this keiyaku kō-based governance. The age ranges and names of these groups varied from hamlet to hamlet. Many male youth associations had the old names of wakashū gumi and kuwasuki kō and included those between 15 of age and mid-30s, or even early

43 Takeuchi Toshimi, Mura to nenrei shūdan (Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 1991), 33 44 Fukutake Tadashi, Fukutake Tadashi chosakushū dai-4 kan: Nihon nōson no shakaiteki seikaku, Nihon no nōson shakai (Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai, 1975), 39. See also Satō Mamoru, Kindai Nihon seinen shūdan kenkyū (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 1970), 17-193 on traditional hamlet youth associations in Tōhoku. 45 Gotō Ichizō, Eien nari, mura no kokoro: [Miyagi-ken Ōsaki chihō] Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa no wakamono tachi (Tokyo: Tomin kyōkai, 1990), 24-26.

#107 40s. The initiation to the hamlet youth association was a significant moment in a man’s life. It meant that he had become a productive member of hamlet society, gained access to hamlet property, and was allowed to marry.46 In some hamlets, it meant that he would eventually represent his household in the guild association because only the eldest son of each household joined the traditional youth associations.

Meiji officials banned these traditional youth associations in 1877 by calling them obsolete and violent. They considered them inappropriate partly because they preserved old customs, such as pre-marital sexual conduct and costly funerals, which Meiji social activists sought to reform. It was also because these traditional youth groups were, indeed, the main physical resource of the hamlet. They took charge of seasonal festivals, hamlet patrols, and fire control. Meiji officials considered that their degree of autonomy sometimes went too far— engaging in political campaigns, ousting officials, forcing others to provide them with alcohol and meals, and so on. “It is of concern if the [new] youth group holds too much power, because youth associations of the past exercised too much power and there were many examples of their causing problems,” Tomeoka argued.47 In its effort to control the means of violence, the Meiji state could not allow local youth groups to maintain much power and autonomy.

Establishing the village youth group in 1905 reflected the admission of Shida village officials that these traditional hamlet youth associations still existed and still played an indispensable role in the village. Even though the new village office appeared to have taken over the administrative function from previous hamlets, the hamlets often maintained their basic

46 Takeuchi, Mura to nenrei shūdan, 5-6. 47 “Seinen dantai ni kansuru chūi jikō,” Miyagi-ken kyōikukai zasshi 175 (October 1911): 53.

#108 function as organic units of governance, and guild associations continued to regulate villagers’ everyday lives.48 The hamlet youth associations, even after the ban by the Meiji government, continued their gatherings under new names, such as “agricultural society” or “fire fighting group.”49 The new village youth group absorbed these hamlet youth groups as its branches. As a result, the age range of village youth group members in Miyagi’s 1909 survey was notably broader (15-40 years of age) than government officials in Tokyo expected (14-20).50 It also led to a rapid expansion of its membership on paper. Within five years of its establishment, the Shida village youth group had 635 members. Takeuchi argued that, because of the heavy dependence on traditional hamlet youth associations, “activities of the new [village-level] youth group lacked originality and inevitably became inactive.”51

Despite these observations, the emergence of village-level youth groups signified important changes in rural societies. One change was a further step toward a male-dominant social system. The military conscription had already raised the value of young male bodies,52 and the effort by the Meiji state to establish new codes of law also institutionalized patriarchy. The

Meiji Civil Code (1896), for example, made the first son of the main family as the sole legitimate

48 The nature of keiyaku kō changed over time to match the changing social classes. One form of hamlet agreements —tanomoshi kō, an agreement of financial cooperation for an occasion such as holding a wedding ceremony and renewing the thatched roof—was particularly prevalent. In some cases, during the transitional landlord-tenant relationship in the 1900s and 1910s, it functioned as the money lending system from the landlords to tenants and facilitated land concentration in the landlords’ hands. See Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin , 58-59. In Shida village, tanomoshi kō continued during World War II, and there were more than 40 groups of tanomoshi kō even in 1950. Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 226. 49 Gotō, Eien nari, 39. 50 Utsumi, Miyagi-ken seinen kyōiku, 57. 51 Takeuchi, Mura to nenrei shūdan, 33. 52 On this point, see Theodore F. Cook, Jr., “Making ‘Soldiers’: The Imperial Army and the Japanese Man in Meiji Society and State,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, ed. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 259-294

#109 heir. Before this, inheritance had no gender specificity in many parts of Miyagi.53 The village- level youth group was part of this trend that enhanced the position of men. Unlike the hamlet age groups that tightly organized both male and female residents, the activities of new youth groups targeted mainly males.54

Another change affected the familial-labor relationship in the hamlet community. For centuries, the landlord family—the “main family” or honke—did not just rent out rice fields to nearby farmers, but formed the core of an organic community with a blurred distinction between family and non-family members.55 A number of young tenants in Tōhoku region started their farming life as apprentices of the honke, and their coming-of-age and future holding of land were determined through their relationship with the main family.56 During the landlord-led reforms,

53 Miyagi-ken Miyagi no joseishi kenkyūkai, Miyagi no joseishi (Sendai: Kahoku shinpōsha, 1999), 12-17. 54 See Takeuchi, Mura to nenrei shūdan, 1-190 for the pre-modern and modern female organizations in Tōhoku hamlets. The young women’s group was nominally established at the same time with the modern male youth groups in Shida, but there was no continuation from the traditional hamlet female associations, and any detail of the young women’s group is absent from the record. The only brief reference is Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 268-9. 55 The honke only consisted of the legitimate line of the heir. The rest of the family members, including second and third children, constituted a subordinate rank of farmers, almost similar to the status of non-related tenant farmers. On the other hand, tenant families usually maintained close relationship with the honke for generations, and sometimes received a portion of land as branch families. Because of this blurred boundary between the family members with blood relationship and others, the entire hamlet community often made up a large family-labor institution (ie). Labor relationship in such communities was usually described as that of “parent” and “child” [oyakata, kokata]. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, this labor relationship changed. Since the Meiji Civil Code presumed clearer lines between family and non-family members, the landlords who accumulated land as moneylenders sought a contract-based relationship with their tenant farmers. (The Code presented legal adoption as the only way to incorporate non-related members into the family.) One example was the use of “common land.” When the village administrative office replaced the private capacity of landlords, its tenancy was contractual, rather than familial. This led tenant farmers to form an alliance to fight the rising rents. After the famine in 1905, tenant alliances spread in Miyagi. Tenant farmers in Shida village established a union in February 1908 to negotiate with the new type of landlord. See Ariga Kizaemon, Ariga Kizaemon chosakushū IX: Ie to oyabun kobun (Tokyo: Miraisha, 2001), 17-153; Nakamura, Miyagi-ken nōmin undōshi, 322. Satō Mamoru also emphasizes the importance of landlords in youth associations in Tōhoku. Satō, Kindai Nihon seinen shūdan kenkyū, 192-193. 56 Before the Meiji period, these apprentice-tenants that worked for landlord families were called “nago.” The nago system originated in the medieval era and continued to exist as customs although the nago relationship changed over time. In Meiji, the nago system was banned and they became tenant farmers. But in the Tōhoku region, the custom remained for the time being because of the slow pace of change in economic renovation and the introduction of monetary economy. For more detail, see Mori Kahē, Ōu nago seido no kenkyū (Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppan kyoku, 1984).

#110 the dominance of the honke institution continued. But the new labor relation based on written contracts ended the traditional life cycle of many tenants, and the new youth groups replaced apprenticeship during the transitional period. In other words, while the village office collectively represented the new landlord class and regulated tenant farmers through written contracts, youth education also ceased to center around the familial-labor relationship, and became a public enterprise under the supervision of village administration and the elementary school.

The Influence of World War I

The nature of village-level youth groups shifted again when male youth became politically and militarily important. During the course of the 1910s and 1920s, the younger generation around the country joined in political rallies and demonstrations in line with various ideologies. In the meantime, Japan participated in World War I as a British ally and fought

German troops in China. Witnessing the new scale of mass mobilization in Europe, the military’s eagerness to intervene into people’s everyday lives expanded greatly during the War.

The centralization of seinendan and the increased influence of the military went hand in hand. Receiving orders from government ministries in 1905, 1915, and 1918, local governments standardized and centralized the network of youth groups. In 1910, the new Shida elementary school principal centralized the youth groups and reinvigorated their stagnant activities.57 The

Shida village youth group was officially named Shida village seinendan in 1916.58 The centralization of the network continued from the village level to the county and prefectural levels. In May 1911, Shida county had a youth association convention for the first time. More

57 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 266, 302-303. 58 Ibid., 267.

#111 than two thousand young men from one town and nine villages of the county gathered in

Furukawa town middle school. The county head Iwabuchi Toshio gave an opening speech and read the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education. The main purpose of the federation was to

“promote unification and communication between each seinendan in the county” through common projects, awards, lectures, sports events, and various learning and disciplining activities.

The attending army officer gave an hour-long talk, entitled “On Military Education,” and discussed the “physique, mentality, obedience” and other qualities that were “demanded in the youth groups from the military’s point of view.” After talks by the officials, three seinendan members gave five-minute speeches. One of them, Sugawara Rikizō, was a 14-year-old farmer from Shida village, and talked about the Boshin Imperial Rescript of 1908, which preached

Emperor-centered nationalism and the spirit of hard work. It was reported that the officials gave him a special prize because “his speaking attitude, intonation, and pronunciation was impressively clear and fluent, and the way he moved the audience of more than two thousand people proved his superb performance.”59

One sign of the army’s influence was renewed attention to sports events. In November

1916, the Miyagi prefecture seinendan was launched, spreading a network over 222 village and town youth groups and involving more than 35,000 members. Its main activity was large-scale sports events. Its inauguration on November 12 accompanied a sports festival, in which 5,000 youth who had won their local competitions participated.60 Sports events of elementary schools and youth groups had been the most popular entertainment in rural villages since early Meiji.

59 “Shida rengō seinen taikai,” Kahoku shinpō, May 8, 1911, 5. 60 “Miyagi-ken seinendan hatsudanshiki,” Miyagi kyōiku 232 (December 1916): 33-36, 45.

#112 These prefecture-level competitions, as well as many county-level ones, excited both youth and audiences and enhanced the popularity of the seinendan.61

Military conscription also gained a new spotlight. After the war, national policy and ideology increased the pressure on the seinendan to produce healthy soldiers. At conscription exam sites, the examinees with a sexually transmitted disease, astigmatic eyes, or just poor health, were treated as disgraces to their village. If they could not read a passage from an elementary school textbook, the examiner blamed their seinendan group by asking them, “did you go to night classes?” and “which teacher was in charge?”62

Even among well-off landlords, military experience became a new source of prestige.

Many landlords enhanced their social status through their experiences as officers in the military in addition to their commitment to agricultural reform. In Shida village, Kadowaki Yoshio embodied a marriage of the two. He was born into a wealthy family in 1872, joined the military in 1894, and was promoted to the private first class in the military police. He fought in Taiwan, seizing the aborigine-owned land. He traveled extensively during the Russo-Japanese War. On his return, Kadowaki established the army reservist group in Shida village in 1910 and took charge of veteran affairs for the next 30 years. He served as the village head between 1912 and

1917. He took position of the Shida village representative of the Agricultural Association in

1906, and was one of the strongest forces promoting agricultural reforms during the Local

Improvement Movement.63 Kadowaki represented the “modern” in many ways in the eyes of the villagers—he had received higher education, had seen foreign places, had been decorated as a

61 Utsumi, Miyagi-ken seinen kyōiku, 87-89. 62 Ban Shōshi, “Chōhei sho zakkan,” Miyagi kyōiku 240 (August 1917): 90. 63 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 286-287.

#113 military officer, and had promoted new agricultural techniques. Kadowaki preached the agrarian ethos to young farmers. Itō Rikichi, known as a model farmer who turned from an impoverished tenant to a land-owning farmer, admired and quoted Kadowaki’s teachings: “Although people tend to call those who seriously engage in agriculture and produce a lot ‘model farmers’ [tokunōka], this is a shallow definition… Model farmers have to be determined by their wide vision and deep thought. In other words, only those who succeeded in comprehensive management of agricultural business and can be models for farmers both in personality and social [responsibility] should be called tokunōka.”64

The Rise of Rural Youth in the 1920s: An Example of Katō Einojō

By the 1920s, the seinendan institutions had experienced multiple rounds of mobilization and centralization by the army and other state ministries. The increasing attention to rural youth education and the established importance of agrarian-military ethos appear to have regulated the lives of seinendan members, or so village leaders, army officers, and state officials intended. But youth did not blindly succumb to this top-down mobilization. On the contrary, many young people pursued activities beyond the scope of official control. They took advantage of the national seinendan network and the improving status of youth in village affairs. For them, youth group activities provided a window to the national and global spaces beyond their hamlets and villages.

Sons of relatively wealthy families could use their new leverage as “rural youth” more readily than average farm youth. Katō Einojō in Aratanome hamlet, Shida village, is a good example. Born in 1904, Katō was the first son of the second largest landlord family in the

64 Ibid., 321-322.

#114 village, holding more than 40 ha in 1928.65 In 1926, he formed a youth group with a few more than a dozen neighborhood youths between the ages of 15 and 26, including his family apprentices and young women. Katō always wanted to study in Tokyo and “fly unto the larger world,” according to his son. Because Katō Einojō’s father expected him to take over as the head of family, he was not allowed to pursue college education in Tokyo as his two younger brothers did, but was sent instead to an agricultural school in Sendai after graduating from the upper-level of the local elementary school. His father, Katō Hisanosuke, was a leader in agricultural innovation in the region and an admired local notable. Rejecting Hisanosuke’s hope that Einojō follow in his footsteps, Einojō ran away from home and enrolled in the Tokyo School of Foreign

Languages, living with his sister, who was married to an aircraft engineer. After a few years,

Katō Hisanosuke came to Tokyo and forced Einojō to go back to Miyagi. Katō Einojō remained bitter about his father’s act throughout his life. Back in Shida, his young rebelliousness had no outlets other than establishing a new youth group. At the same time, Katō’s knowledge of art, literature, foreign affairs, and agriculture attracted the young people in Aratanome. He even knew how to use Western cutlery and play golf. In addition to Katō’s charisma, he provided a free space for the neighborhood youth to hang out. His parents resided separately in nearby

Nakaniida hamlet, where they started a new rice threshing and carrying company. The Katō family’s original house in Aratanome, with its spacious garden, became a perfect place for the neighborhood youth to gather and enjoy sports.66

65 Furukawa shishi hensan iinkai, ed., Furukawa shishi dai-9 kan shiryō IV: kindai, gendai (Miyagi: Furukawa-shi, 2005), 470. Forty ha is equivalent of 0.4 km2. 66 Information of this paragraph and the following is based on an interview with Katō Haruhiko in Ōsaki city on April 24, 2012 and Katō Einojō’s memoirs edited by Katō Haruhiko. Katō Haruhiko ed., Jinsei sanmyaku yume bōbō: Katō Einojō ikōshū (Ōsaki, printed by editor, 1987). See also Gotō, Eien nari, 110-130; Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 289-290.

#115 The most intriguing aspect of Katō’s youth group was its name, “the Aratanome 4-H club.” When Katō discussed with his friends the question of what to name their gatherings, he remembered that his teacher in the upper-level elementary school, Takahashi Gunji, once mentioned the American 4-H club, which put a strong emphasis on youth training through rural life. Takahashi was a young intellectual who had just graduated from normal school. Katō deliberately avoided using the common names, seinenkai or seinendan. For him, the initiative of youth themselves, not its affiliation to the government, characterized the group. He also felt alienated from the official purpose of seinendan training because his short stature had prevented him from passing the conscription exam. The “4-H club” expressed his connection to the outside world and his liberation from the rules of a landlord family and hamlet. It also symbolized the cultural leadership of a non-military figure with agrarian ideals. The members held evening gatherings more than 60 times within the first 14 months. Katō gave lectures on scientific developments, international affairs, architecture in Tokyo, Japanese economic policies, and social issues. He assigned two members to give a speech at every gathering. For many members, this was their first experience of speaking in front of an audience. After sharing knowledge and practicing public speeches, they played cards and listened to music on Katō’s gramophone, a rare possession in those days.

After five years of these activities, Katō wanted to start a new group project of publishing a journal. He picked the title, Omoto (Rhodea), an evergreen plant that represented eternal youth.

At one gathering, Einojō suggested that the members write essays together and watched them struggling with paper and pen. “I feel sorry hearing them sighing deeply in front of the distributed paper,” he wrote in his own essay, “but it is ‘spare the rod and spoil the child.’

#116 Opportunities do not come twice. Without struggle, we do not become men with humanity.”67

Group members wrote poems and essays about their work, families, gardens, and daily lives.

One member who spelled his name Naoji in Roman characters wrote about the 4-H club.

“Writing an essay is not easy… The leader said, ‘try writing anything that comes to your mind as it is’… what on earth should I write about? … Since the inauguration of the club, the knowledge of the members improved a lot. We take turns to give speeches, and now we have come to write essays for a journal. It feels delightful, as if we had become big scholars or something.”68

Katō Einojō’s lack of interest in the Shida village seinendan did not mean that the 4-H club was antagonistic to the hamlet and village order. In Omoto, he expressed strong agrarianist ideals and respect for those who performed military service in the same way the seinendan did.

One of the group’s first activities was to save money through collective labor, such as selling eggs. The government had been campaigning to promote savings around the country, and Katō believed that labor and savings projects would allow youth to learn self-discipline as well as help the national economy. The organization of the 4-H club followed the standard format of government-led seinendan despite its more voluntary nature. The members agreed on formal regulations and rules, elected executive members with limited tenure, and held three kinds of meetings (regular, convened, and executive). They also worked closely with the patrolling group of Aratanome hamlet. The patrolling group consisted of the heads of households in Aratanome, who traditionally supervised the pre-Meiji youth group and hamlet affairs in general.69 Katō’s leadership position replicated the teacher’s role in the village seinendan. Although the 4-H club

67 Katō Einojō, “Buttsukaranakyā,” Omoto 1 (December 1931): 6-10. 68 Naoji, “Yabuhebi,” Omoto 1 (December 1931): 20-21. 69 Gotō, Eien nari, 121-122.

#117 was no doubt fun and approachable for the members, their relationship with Katō was undeniably hierarchical. As such, the 4-H club in Aratanome was a new phenomenon that occurred outside official purview, but it combined many features of the old hamlet youth group and new seinendan.

The 4-H club showed how youth from relatively well-off families incorporated the global and national discourse of “rural youth” and attempted to design their own group. In its local context, it mirrored the changing position of landlord classes. After the series of Meiji famines, agricultural production steadily increased during the 1920s and expanded the fortunes of the middling farmers who cultivated between one and five ha of rice paddies either as land-owning farmers or relatively well-off tenants. Unlike in the Meiji era, agricultural advancement relied less on the initiative of landlords, and more on public research centers and government investment in larger-scale irrigation and land reforms. The Agricultural Association, originally the league of landlords, turned into an institution that promoted new agricultural techniques to support these middling farmers. It was not a coincidence that Katō Hisanosuke, facing this changing status of his family, felt compelled to start a new rice distribution business.

Furthermore, starting from the mid-1920s, tenant farmers organized large-scale disputes all over the country to secure the rights of tenancy. Many of them won permanent cultivation rights, which dramatically limited the power of landlords, and virtually ended the tight control of landlords over village affairs.70 In the late 1920s, witnessing the collapse of the organic hamlet communities that evolved around the landlord’s household, the village office emphasized the old

70 See Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin, 303-383.

#118 slogan of “united village” [zenson itchi] in an attempt to alleviate class confrontation in the village.71

Katō Einojō had a stake in this changing environment. Holding a grudge against the older landlord system that forced him to abandon his dream in the city, he might have felt that he was taking part in the changes associated with the new rural dynamism. The strong emphasis on youthfulness of the 4-H club provided him with a new community that replaced the old landlord- tenant hierarchy that had previously dominated hamlet affairs. Perhaps he felt proud of creating new ties with villagers when his father had a harder time maintaining the old ones. Yet, at the same time, Katō Einojō’s leadership in the 4-H club relied on urban experiences that were available only to the sons of landlord families. Regardless of Katō’s intentions, the club helped the village administration mitigate confrontation between the classes and secure the overall status of the landlords.

The 4-H club’s detachment from class confrontation stands out in light of involvement of many rural youth in tenant disputes in the 1920s. Since these conflicts often affected entire village (hamlet) populations, many seinendan groups and their members had no choice but to participate. In Toyosato village in Miyagi, for example, the seinendan leader played an active part in bringing the tenants’ demands to the village assembly in 1927.72 In some cases, rural youth became leftist activists. Inomata Yūjirō, once famous as a model farmer who won a youth speech contest in the early 1910s in a village in Miyagi, turned to socialist activities in the 1920s.

Inspired by activists’ calls for a peasant uprising, he started a tenant union in his home village.

71 Ibid., 378-379. 72 Yonekura Tatsujirō, Miyagi kusa no ne undō no gunzō (Sendai: Azuma shobō, 1984), 80.

#119 He was arrested and tortured repeatedly during the police crackdown on Communist Party members in 1928.73 The Shida region was relatively slow in joining these movements, but by

1930, even Shida village, where Katō Einojō lived, had two major disputes with more to follow in the subsequent years.74 Before the tenant disputes spread, the region was already a site of contentious politics. Various political parties rallied in adjacent Furukawa town in the 1920s.75

Furukawa was home to the nationally famous liberal thinker, Yoshino Sakuzō. The same town elected Akamatsu Katsumaro, a Socialist Party leader, to the House of Representatives in 1928.76

It is hard to imagine that Katō Einojō accidentally missed these lively political movements in neighboring Furukawa. He seemed to have deliberately maintained his youth group as a circle of neighborhood young people and avoided getting involved in “class struggle” of any kind.

Despite his avoidance of leftist activism, Katō’s 4-H club was a product of his own rebelliousness. Because of the intense confrontation between the government and leftist activists, political polarization appeared to define youth activism in the 1920s and early 30s.77 The youth groups of the two confronting camps fought proxy battles over access to the masses. But even more noteworthy was the variety of motivations and the strong presence of localized agendas on both sides. Economic and labor relationships constituted only one of the factors that drove youth to leftist politics. They were motivated by generational conflicts, anti-urbanism, family tensions,

73 Ibid., 104-114. Saitō Yoshirō, Monogatari Miyagi-ken nōmin undōshi chū (Sendai: Hikari shobō, 1985), 7-32. 74 Furukawa shishi hensan iinkai, 110-115. 75 For example, “Shamintō enzetsukai,” Kahoku shinpō August 13, 1928, 6. 76 Furukawa shishi hensan iinkai, 102 -111. 77 For example, Sandra Wilson regards the left-leaning young groups in Nagano as having an independent voice as opposed to government-sanctioned ones. In such view, the dichotomy between the left and the right was the same as being “active” and “passive” respectively. Sandra Wilson, “Angry young men and the Japanese state,” in Society and the State in Interwar Japan, ed. Elise Timpton (London: Routlege, 1997), 100-125.

#120 and other conflicts in hamlet society when they chose to join a youth group of one political hue or the other.78 A surprising consequence for political leaders was to see former model youth participating in tenant disputes, even as many rebellious youth ended up in conservative positions. The unpredictable nature of youth had already surprised the officials during the rice riots in 1918, sparked by the skyrocketing price of rice. Top government officials like Tanaka

Giichi and Tazawa Yoshiharu expected the seinendan and army reservist groups to help the government maintain the social order during the chaos. Yet more than 10% of the 8,000 arrests turned out to be of members of these groups.79 In contrast, Katō Einojō’s 4-H club seems to have been conformist, or at least not leaning to the left. Nonetheless, he was rebelling against his own environment, except that his rebellion took the form of the deployment of his modern knowledge and the creation of a strong generational community, rather than engagement in political demonstrations.

The “Rural Youth Industry”

Stories of Katō Einojō and many individual youths establishing and engaging in private youth groups are testament to the expansive space of activities for young men in the countryside in the 1920s. For average farm youth who did not have family wealth or status like Katō’s, it was the formation of what I call the “Rural Youth Industry” through the expansion of youth training institutions in 1926 that altered their social leverage and allowed them to challenge the established authorities.

78 Hirayama Kazuhiko gives an elaborate examination of how seinendan turned to leftist activities in various social tensions in Shimoina village, Nagano prefecture. Hirayama Kazuhiko, Seinen shūdanshi kenkyū josetsu II (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1978), 108-257. 79 Kataguchi Hiroshi, “Kome sōdō to seinendan,” Seikei daigaku seiji keizai ronsō shūkan kinen ronbunshū jōkan (November 1968): 208-232.

#121 Youth training centers, established in 1926 and turned into youth schools in 1935, were not the only schools that took charge of training working youth. Since the beginning of the Local

Improvement Movement, educators in the countryside made every effort to establish a supplementary vocational school in every elementary school. In Miyagi, a total of 210 vocational schools had been built by 1926.80 In Shida, the village head, Kadowaki Yoshio, decided to set up a supplementary agricultural school in 1915.81 In these schools, elementary schoolteachers continued to give a few hours of instruction a week to their school graduates to maintain their academic level and improve their agricultural skills. By the 1920s, the village had the upper-level elementary program, the supplementary vocational (agricultural) school, and the youth groups to supervise farming village youth.82

These facilities faced increasing difficulty in keeping young people in the villages. Japan of the 1920s experienced a widening gap between urban consumer culture and rural life, fanning the “city fever” among rural youth as was the case with Katō Einojō. The regional newspaper

Kahoku shinpō repeatedly pointed out the need to halt youth’s urban migration. “Local authorities and local governments need to respond with appropriate measures to the youth who move to cities as a result of the lack of educational facilities,” it reported in 1922.83 Its editorial

80 Miyagi-ken kyōiku iinkai, ed., Miyagi-ken kyōiku hyaku-nenshi dai-2 kan: Taishō, Shōwa zenki hen (Tokyo: Gyōsei, 1977), 488. Female and male students usually did not attend the same classes but many schools offered sewing and other skill-oriented classes for female students, too. This movement reflected a heated debate over the goal of education in the countryside—Was it to create nation-conscious citizens with standardized education, or provide students with practical skill useful for their specific occupations? Generally moving towards an expansion of vocational training, many schools offered agricultural training programs to farming youth. 81 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 286-289. 82 In some villages, youth groups’ night classes became the substitute of supplementary technical schools. Okabe kyōiku kenkyūshitsu, Nōson ni okeru seinen kyōiku: sono mondai to hōsaku (Tokyo: Ryūginsha, 1942), 34; Hijikata, 200. By the late 1920s, more than 70% of agricultural populations received vocational training in these institutions. Okabe kyōiku kenkyūshitsu, 28. 83 “Chihō seinen no toshi shūchū bōshi,” Kahoku shinpō, July 2, 1922, 3.

#122 claimed that, although the local seinendan had been doing a wonderful job providing civic education and vocational training, “local youth do not feel satisfied and still leave farms for the city to seek happiness.”84

The army and its Minister, Ugaki Kazushige, finding their concerns deeply intertwined with rural problems, advocated establishing the youth training center to improve the quality of future rural conscripts.85 Students were given the “youth handbook” [seinen techō], in imitation of the military handbook [guntai techō], to carry around rules and slogans and to record their activities.86 Miyagi prefecture quickly established 244 centers in July and August 1926, which included one in Shida village.87

How did such expansion of military’s intervention in the village affect the life of young men in the countryside? The biggest difference it made was not in the content of education—the marriage between military and agrarian ideals was not new. More significant was the fact that hundreds of rural youth found employment as temporary instructors in the newly established youth training centers. Supplementary vocational schools already had a chronic problem in

84 “Chihō seinen no jūdai sekinin,” Kahoku shinpō, June 15, 1923, 2. 85 Because supplementary technical schools usually educated youth under 16 years old, the army aimed at tying all youth under the conscription age of 20 to the elementary school. To facilitate participation, the tuition was free and the graduates could shorten the military service from two years to one year and half. By shrinking the conscription and widening pre-military training instead, the army attempted to improve the quality of conscripts while satisfying the public demand for de-militarization spreading in the 1920s. See Chapter 1. 86 Miyagi-ken kyōiku iinkai, Miyagi-ken kyōiku hyaku-nenshi, 493-494. 87 Utsumi, Miyagi-ken seinen kyōiku, 90-91. With an addition of the youth training center, however, the system of youth education became redundant and confusing. In three out of every ten villages, the supplementary technical schools virtually functioned as the youth training center. The national association of supplementary vocational schools filed an official complaint to the government in 1927, saying that “in the regions where the youth training center was forcefully implemented against the supplementary technical school, the cost rose tremendously and the administration became too troublesome. It not only generated numerous obstacles, but in extreme cases, it also gave double burdens to the youth and students. “Seinen kuren to jitsugyō hoshū gakkō tono kankei ni kansuru kengi,” Miyagi kyōiku 338 (August 1927): 90. To streamline youth education facilities, the supplementary vocational school and the youth school were merged together to become “youth school” [seinen gakkō] in 1935.

#123 finding appropriate teachers. Because of financial constraints, elementary schoolteachers were responsible for vocational classes, but those who had gone to normal schools had very little experience in agriculture. “Looking at the reality of agricultural education at the elementary school, [teachers] just follow pages of the agricultural textbook as if it was a reading class, let

50-60 students cultivate only 100m2 of practice farms in their wooden sandals…, or make them clean the campus or water system to kill time,” an advocate of vocational education in Miyagi complained in 1925.88 In the new centers, teachers had to give military-like physical training as well. Moreover, students in youth training centers (and in youth schools, built after 1935) were working-age farmers who were not easy for regular schoolteachers to teach. One instructor described the difficulty in his memoir:

The backgrounds of the students in youth schools are significantly different [from those of elementary school children or middle school students], so the difficulty of teaching and training at school is by no means comparable. In youth schools, just making them attend on schedule takes so much effort… In addition, it is troublesome that many who come to school are not motivated, either. A good number of them come here to have fun. It is frustrating because they are not interested in the subject at all and consider the day as their holiday. When extreme, they enter the clean classrooms with their shoes and sandals on, smoke although they are too young for that, eat snacks at the store in front of the school, change clothes and go see motion pictures in the middle of the class… Female teachers hate the students as if they were worms, and even male teachers try to 89 !escape them. To solve the problem of finding teachers, villages hired those who experienced both farming and conscription as part-time instructors. Each youth training center usually had about three or four of these in addition to five or six regular schoolteachers. This means that, in Miyagi, more than 750 army reservist members trained younger generations. They also switched

88 Akama Heikichi, “Hoshū kyōiku no kekkan to sono kairyō hōan,” Miyagi kyōiku 315 (September 1925): 40. 89 Shimogōri Heiji, Sennin kyōin nōson seinengakkō no keiei (Tokyo: Daiichi shuppan kyōkai, 1939), 28-29.

#124 instructors every few years. Outside Miyagi, the ratio of reservist instructors was 10% higher, creating even more jobs.90 In national statistics, more than 40% of youth school instructors consisted of those without formal qualification as teachers.91

A few elements in this recruitment affected youth. Most significantly, the required resume writing brought farm youth the first opportunity to apply a narrative of career development to their own lives. The newly hired instructors filed their resumes at the schools, and the schools reported all of them to the prefecture. Hundreds of these youth, who would otherwise remain nameless even in local histories, suddenly appeared as individuals with self-narrated career records in Miyagi’s prefectural archives. Their resumes were simple. They were born around the time of the Russo-Japanese War and graduated from upper-level of the elementary school. Some attended the supplementary vocational school for another year or two. Most engaged in family farming after that. Within a few years, schools started hiring them. All of them had conscript experience, and some listed more detailed advances and awards they received during their military service. However simple, through compiling these resumes, farm youth began to find meaning in these experiences and to view themselves as career-seeking professionals.

Another element was financial reward. Their promised salaries varied between 20 and 60 yen for 50-100 hours of physical training instruction a year.92 Their hourly rate was equivalent to full-time substitute male teachers in Miyagi’s elementary schools.93 Although it was small in

90 Miyagi-ken kyōiku iinkai, Miyagi-ken kyōiku hyaku-nenshi, 497. 91 See Okabe kyōiku kenkyūshitsu, Nōson ni okeru seinen kyōiku, 106. Chart 52. 92 Their resumes are filed in “Gakuji: Seinen kurenjo shidōin kaishoku” 3-0016 (1927), “Gakuji: Seinen kunrenjo” 3-0016 (1928), “Gakuji: shakai kyōiku, seinen kunenjo kankei” 3-0019 (1929) in Miyagi-ken kōbunshokan. 93 The hourly rate was calculated based on the average of monthly income of male substitute teachers. They received about 35-38 yen every month. Miyagi-ken chiji kanbō, Shōwa 2-nen Miyagi-ken tōkeisho dai-1 kan: gakuji (Sendai: Miyagi-ken, 1929), 35.

#125 comparison to urban jobs and was often delayed, this salary was significantly higher than relief work provided by the government in the rural villages of the depression.94 Accompanying the monetary compensation was social recognition as school instructors. Schoolteachers were often the only intellectuals known to farming youth. In order to become full-time teachers, they needed a degree from competitive programs in either a middle school or a normal school.95 With an expansion of youth training centers, farm youth without teacher training were recruited and suddenly gained an opportunity to be called a teacher [sensei].

By the mid-1930s, the series of youth education institutions—the seinendan, supplementary vocational schools, youth training centers, and later youth schools—created the occupational space that I call the “Rural Youth Industry,” where farm youth were both the consumers and providers of youth training.96 The Rural Youth Industry overlapped with a growing discursive space of seinendan newsletters, circulating at the village, prefectural, and national levels. As new instructors and newsletter writers, they celebrated the superiority of

“rural youth” and re-interpreted “risshin shusse” (“rising in the world”) as rural-based careers. In the Rural Youth Industry, farm youth transformed themselves from perpetual farmers to success- seeking rural youth who shared a common identity with their peers in other rural areas. After teaching experience in the youth training center, many continued to up the career ladder,

94 Kerry Smith calculated that in Fukushima, rural residents worked 25.5 days a year in village relief programs and earned 17 yen doing so on average. Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center), 149. Teachers experienced a decrease in their salaries and delays in payments during the Depression. See Kubo Yoshizō, Nihon fashizumu kyōiku seisakushi (Tokyo: Meiji tosho shuppan, 1969), 183-194, which shows that in Miyagi, 47 schools could not pay their teachers in June 1931. 95 When the supplementary vocational school needed more teachers with practical skill, prefectural governments established vocational teachers training schools. This gradually opened up a window for minimally-educated rural youth. 96 These institutions were very closely related with each other in management and staff. See Okabe kyōiku kenkyūshitsu, Nōson ni okeru seinen kyōiku, 103-105 and 111-113.

#126 becoming full-time teachers in elementary schools, technical advisors in agricultural research centers, and seinendan leaders.97

In effect, the establishment of youth training centers—typical disciplining institutions from state officials’ point of view—challenged the previous rural hierarchy by empowering average farm youth. People’s occupations used to be determined by the family wealth and status, but the Rural Youth Industry gave both means and confidence to farm youth to alter their position. This was a very different kind of self-empowerment from that sought by the son of a landlord, Katō Einojō, or the “autonomy of youth” envisioned by leftist activists.

The careerization of “rural youth” propelled the youth to embrace agrarianism, anti- urban, and even anti-intellectual feelings. For example, Mori Shigeshi, a youth group member in

Edano village, Igu county (southern Miyagi), demanded a pension for farmers equivalent to that for retired government officials in his hand-written essay. “Our empire is an agricultural nation as we all learned in the elementary school… It is a contradiction in logic and ignorance of humanity that farmers, the foundation of nation-building… are left without any pension.”98 His claim deliberately juxtaposed rural careers and the urban academic success that culminated in positions of state officials. Nearly all of the journals compiled by seinendan members in these years called for rural youth’s awareness of their grave responsibility to restore the countryside.

Satō Kesao, another member in the Edano seinendan, was convinced that “today, the city- centered material civilization has already declined, and the time has come for the revival of rural- centered spiritual culture.” In his view, leftist activists were urban products. “Has any of the left-

97 See the resumes of teachers in youth schools filed in 3-0007 (1936), Miyagi-ken kōbunshokan. 98 Mori Shigeshi “Tate nōson sei,” Seinen to shojo 5 (December 1928): 9-11.

#127 leaning thinkers detested these days come from hardworking rural villages? If there is, he is just instigated [by others]. In any period, such thoughts are generated from a corner of the materially and spiritually impoverished city.”99 Satō’s passionate essay revealed that the state was not simply controlling the mindset of the youth, but rather youth could incorporate the prose of the state to assert their moral authority against the urban, the educated, and the old. This mutual co- optation flourished in the Rural Youth Industry.

The Rural Youth Industry was a male-dominant space, but young women were not totally left out of the rise of “rural youth.” Young women’s groups developed in a smaller scale than the seinendan. Some villages established study groups for female elementary school graduates also around 1905, but without much continuation from the traditional hamlet associations.100 After

World War I, activists and teachers considered that young women should obtain shūyō (moral training) and the spirit of hard work so that they would become hardworking wives and healthy mothers.101 In 1917, a national network of young women’s groups, called shojokai (maidens’ groups) were established, and they were transformed into Greater Japan Women’s Youth Group

Federation [Dai Nihon joshi seinendan rengō] in 1927.102 The founder of the shojokai network,

Amano Fujio, argued that the shojokai were the mother of the seinendan, and “if ‘youth’ [seinen] are the element of national energy, ‘young women’ [shojo] are the source of that energy.”103 In the 1920s, at least in Miyagi, many young women participated in the discursive space of rural

99 Satō Kesao, “Tate,” Seinen to shojo 5 (December 1928): 14-16. 100 Watanabe Yōko, Kindai Nihon joshi shakai kyōiku seiritsushi: Shojokai no zenkoku soshikika to shidō shisō (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1997), 33-35. 101 Ibid., 104-139. 102 Ibid., 407-434. 103 Amano Fujio, Nōson shojokai no soshiki oyobi shidō (Tokyo: Rakuyōdō, 1916), 1.

#128 youth through seinendan newsletters. Like their male counterparts, young women were hired by supplementary vocational schools and youth schools where girls obtained skills in sericulture, household accounting, sewing, cooking, and other home sciences. They faced a different set of social pressure from male counterparts. Because schooling was less common among female farmers, education outside the realm of formal schooling had a more significant impact in their pursuit of a rural modernity.

Conclusion

The seinendan movement in Shida village in Miyagi shows that, despite the rhetoric in mobilization, the embrace of Japanese agrarian nationalism was not necessarily the main driving force of mobilization but rather a result of youth’s aspiration for social mobility. At the initial stage, youth groups served local landlords. They allowed landlords to enhance power and prestige as rural modernizers. In the 1920s, as seen in Katō Einojō’s 4-H club and the village seinendan, youth took over the role of rural modernizers, weakening the presence of the older landlords. In the 1920s, with the help of peaking youth activism and the discursive rise of “rural youth,” village youth developed a sense of moral superiority vis-à-vis urban youth and older generations. From their point of view, rural youth mobilization was a chance to break the social hierarchy. Agrarian nationalism boosted their morale and inspired them to confront urban centrism and the establishment in the family and village. Regardless of what national leaders envisioned achieving through youth training centers, the youth consumed the power of the state in their immediate contexts and used the rhetoric of agrarian nationalism to their own benefit.

I used the term “Rural Youth Industry” to identify the mechanism in which these youth turned national mobilization into social opportunities. Although the seinendan symbolized

#129 “modern youth” and “rural modernity” from the time it became a national movement in 1905, it was not until the 1920s that average agrarian youth found a solid ground from which they could pursue career-oriented goals. The job positions created by the establishment of youth training centers not only changed their financial opportunities, but elevated their sense of self-worth.

They shared an identity as “rural youth” in the communication sphere that expanded through the centralization of the seinendan network. The nationalization of agrarian youth was a continuous process since the Meiji period, and it accelerated in the 1920s and 30s when the youth formed the

Rural Youth Industry.

! ! ! ! !

#130 ![The Inauguration of Miyagi Prefecture Seinendan Federation] Source: Miyagi kyōiku (December, 1916) !

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

#131 ![Examples of Resumes in Miyagi Kōbunshokan] !Top: Hase Kunio, 1927, 3-0016 Gakuji, Seinen kunrenjo shidōin kaishoku Bottom: Satō Kengo, 1928, 3-0016 Gakuji Seinen kunrenjo

#132 ! ! ! ! ! Chapter 4: The Rise and Demise of Rural Youth in Shida, Miyagi (1930s-1945) !

The “Rural Youth Industry,” developed after 1926 as an occupational and discursive sphere where young farmers sought career paths as “rural youth,” did not grow only in counterpoise to urban dominance of Japanese society. It also faced worsening rural conditions during the depression of the early 1930s and the need for agricultural expansion to support

Japan’s war efforts later in the decade. Young farmers in the Rural Youth Industry were to shoulder the responsibility to boost social morale and help the rural economy to recover. In one sense, this hardship enhanced the importance of rural youth in national policy and discourse in a similar way that the Local Improvement Movement had in the 1900s and 1910s. Young men were central in the governmental Rural Revitalization Campaign, launched in 1932 to tackle rural depression and facilitate wartime mass mobilization. At the same time, the expanding imperial frontiers in Manchuria elevated the image of rural youth as imperial forces.

Despite the enhanced image of rural youth, the routes to achieving personal success in their home villages disappeared at the height of wartime mobilization. The majority had to leave their villages as industrial workers, soldiers, and colonial migrants, and few returned before

1945. The ever-expanding youth training institutions no longer provided an autonomous space for the youth, either. In other words, although mobilization continued, the Rural Youth Industry

#133 —the mechanism that transformed mobilization into mobility—collapsed. This marked the start of an era of fascist mobilization, or expansion of the state’s direct control over individuals. Katō

Einojō’s involvement in wartime mobilization, no longer as a rebellious youth but as an established local notable, shows that the celebration of “youth” and “farmers” over the preceding decades seamlessly transitioned to fascist mobilization.

“Rural Youth” in the Great Depression and War

Japan was already in the economic crisis before the global economic depression began in

1929. Rice prices fell most years in the 1920s, and banks and businesses collapsed in 1927. The

Great Depression brought another blow to the market, making the value of agricultural products plummet almost by half in the two years between 1929 and 1931. During the 1920s, a large number of people moved from the countryside to urban centers, widening the gap between city and countryside.1 Unemployment in the depression forced many urban migrants to return to their home villages, creating the problem of excess population in the countryside.2 The frustration born of rural poverty led to an upsurge of tenant disputes. It even led to a coup attempt on May

15, 1932 by young military officers also drew national attention to the rural predicament. One of the arrested officers testified that a reason for their action “was to help the families of the soldiers from Tōhoku. A peasant uprising was sure to occur if that state of affairs was allowed to continue.”3

1 See Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center), 41-83. Sunaga Shigemitsu, ed., Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin: suitō tansaku nōgyō no keizaigakuteki kenkyū, Nangō-mura (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 1966), 475-477. 2

3 Hosaka Masayasu, Go-ichigo jiken:Tachibana Kōaburō to Aikyōjuku no kiseki (Tokyo: Sōshisha, 1974), 327, translated and quoted in Smith, A Time of Crisis, 81. Also see Suematsu Tahei, Watashi no Shōwashi (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1963), 27-28, 82-83.

#134 In 1932 and 34, the Tōhoku region was hit by unusually cold weather, which caused two devastatingly poor harvests. The scale of devastation of these famines was reported widely as a national tragedy. Photos of starving babies and exhausted mothers and stories of thousands of schoolchildren getting vision impaired by malnutrition were carried in regional and national newspapers on a daily basis for months.4 In Aomori prefecture alone, more than 2,400 girls were reportedly “sold” to sex industries or factories by their starving families in 1933.5 Shida county of Miyagi experienced massive rainfall in the summer 1932, which worsened the already severe damage to crop yields, leading to chronic food shortages.6 In 1934, Shida again faced a combination of cold weather and water damage. Particularly hard hit was Kashimadai hamlet, where 65% of the farming land produced absolutely nothing, causing the farmers to “stand on the

[border]line of starvation,” reported Kahoku shinpō.7 This led to another surge of tenancy conflicts in Shida in the early 1930s.8 Since the price of rice plunged during the depression, landlords demanded that tenants compensate for the deteriorating quality of rice by providing a larger amount. Kahoku shinpō reported that this caused the farmers a “blood-sucking pain”9 and, after the Mass Party’s involvement, Shida region reportedly became “the hottest region of peasant disputes in the prefecture.”10

4 Mumeisha published a collection of newspaper articles (mainly of Tokyō Asahi nichinichi and Tōō nippō). Mumyōsha, ed., Shinbun shiryō: Tōhoku daikyōsaku (Akita: Mumyōsha shuppan, 1991). 5 “Kono hisanji! Urareta musume sengohyaku mei: kyōsaku ga honken nōgyoson ni oyoboshita eikyō,” Tōō nippō May 3, 1933, in Mumyōsha, 35. 6 “Bareisho mo kuitsukusu,” Kahoku shinpō, August 1, 1932, 4. 7 “Sui, reigai no jūatsu ni kigasen ni tatsu nōmin,” Kahoku shinpō, November 19, 1934. 8 Nōmin kyōiku kyōkai, Nōmin no shososhiki keitai ni kansuru kenkyū: Miyagi-ken Shida-gun Matsuyama-cho no jittai chōsa (n.p. Nōmin kyōiku kyōkai: 1958), 5. 9 “Nōmin akka no ichiin wa kore,” Kahoku shinpō, May 5, 1930, 6. 10 “Shida mura ni matamata kosaku sōgi boppatsu,” Kahoku shinpō, January 28, 1931, 4.

#135 Tōhoku received overwhelming sympathy, but this seemed to be another confirmation of the region’s inferior status within the empire. In the early 1930s, heavy industry dictated the

Japanese labor market and widened the gap between the countryside and cities.11 “[T]he famine

[of 1934],” historian Kerry Smith argues, “was in many ways a reminder of just how wide the gap had become between the modern, developed sector and the countryside.”12 Urban intellectuals considered that more modernization—rational and effective farming—was the only remedy for Tōhoku’s plight. Agencies, such as the Home Ministry and the semi-governmental

Imperial Agricultural Association, conducted a variety of research on the causes, situations, and solutions to rescue Tōhoku. Some of them characterized the tradition of Tōhoku agriculture as the source of the problem, pointing out “simple management,” “primitive land use,” “backward use of labor,” and “inferior agricultural productivity.”13

The Rural Revitalization Campaign was launched nationally in 1932 as a product of local initiatives and compromise among policymakers. Agrarian activists, the army, and the Ministry of Agriculture were more sympathetic to the dire rural situation and requested the cabinet to provide expansive budget to help farmers through public relief work. In fact, it was thanks to the campaigns and petitions by agrarianists that the press made “the village problem” national news in 1932.14 But Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo refused to allocate large resources to the rural problem, cutting the budget for emergency relief from 366 million yen in 1933 to 235 million yen in the following year. Instead, the “self-revitalization” [jiriki kōsei] campaign, which

11 Smith, A Time of Crisis, 16-17 12 Ibid., 252. 13 Teikoku nōkai, Tōhoku chihō nōson ni kansuru chōsa jittaihen (March 1935), 433-481, reprinted in Kusumoto Masahiro, ed., Kyōkōka no Tōhoku nōson fukkokuban (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1984), 603-651. 14 Smith, A Time of Crisis, 112.

#136 originated in local advocacy of the Hyōgo Prefecture Agricultural Association, received enthusiastic support from Takahashi and other policymakers. It exalted the familiar Hōtoku philosophy of moral uplift, which emphasized individuals’ responsibility in maintaining sound management of rural households and village society. The campaign, designated by state officials as the “Farm, Mountain, and Fishing Village Economic Revitalization Campaign,” was to cost the government only a minimum and bring about a maximum result.15

In response to this campaign, local leaders in each village and hamlet promoted the spirit of self-help and pushed the limit of productivity through labor- and fertilizer-intensive agriculture. Shida village’s participation in the movement also emphasized “self-reliance” and sought to overcome the massive debt of villagers without help of the government. As a measure of self-reliance, the village head Katō Hisanosuke, father of Katō Einojō of the 4-H club, established a cooperative, “two-eight society,” in 1934. He encouraged the villagers to commit three hours every night to domestic industries while farming off-season between fall and spring, save 20% of the profit, and use 80% to pay taxes. Involving almost all the households of the village, the two-eight society also tried to reform everyday customs and cut spending for weddings, funerals, and other ceremonies.16

The young generation took many responsibilities in and outside the Rural Revitalization

Campaign. This expanded the burden on rural youth to work harder.17 In addition to their labor,

15 For the detail on this campaign in Miyagi, see Satō Nobuo, Sensō no jidai no mura okoshi (Sendai: Nanbokusha, 2007). 16 “Shida mura ni-hachi-kai kyō hakkaishiki,” Kahoku shinpō, February 22, 1934, 8. For the detail of the revitalization campaign at hamlet and village level, see Smith, A Time of Crisis, 224-268. 17 For example, see “Seinen no chikara o motte Yanaizu-chō kōsei o hakaru,” Kahoku shinpō, April 23, 1934, 8.

#137 seinendan members provided villagers with morale-lifting entertainment.18 In Shida’s neighboring Ōnuki village, they managed to bring popular motion pictures for evening screenings. Even though they could not afford to hire a narrator [benshi], villagers watched new samurai films in an outdoor theater set up by the seinendan. Youth presented amateur plays, music, and vaudeville performances at seasonal festivals.19 The sports festivals organized and performed by the seinendan continued to be one of the biggest social events in rural villages, and nearly all residents came to see and participate in the games. Ōnuki village youth used humor to turn even the government slogan of “self-reliance” into the name of a sport game.20

The category of “rural youth” continued to symbolize the bright and hopeful future.

Seinendan activities in each hamlet and the news of the conscripts from the village fighting for the recently established puppet state in northeast China, Manchukuo, were often the only encouraging news to help the villagers briefly forget the reality of the rural conditions.21 In newspapers, photos of young men in the uniforms of the military, seinendan, or youth training center, represented the modern force in the countryside, making a visual contrast to the reports on the unemployed and starving population. Youth speech contests, usually called “yūben

(eloquence) competitions” were widely reported, often attaching photos of a young man on the podium in front of equally young audience. In the 1929 Miyagi prefecture-level competition, the

18 Shida’s neighbor Ōnuki, in the village’s newsletters, often highlighted the central role of seinendan members in the village’s social life. Itō Takuji, Ōnuki-mura monogatari: kutō no nōminshi (Furukawa: Ōsaki taimususha, 1978) introduces the Ōnuki village newsletters in detail. 19 Itō, Ōnuki-mura monogatari, 67-8. 20 Ibid., 152. 21 For example, a teacher in Miyagi wrote that “when I opened newspaper and read the accomplishments of the soldiers was the only time of the day when I found comfort” in the mid-1930s. Ōe Masao, “Manshū dayori,” Miyagi kyōiku 523 (January, 1943): 67.

#138 speeches “A Roar of a Young Man” and “Rescue a Small Rural Village” received the first and second prizes.22 Other newspaper reports praised rural youth for helping the villagers complete tax payments,23 rescuing neighbors from a fire,24 diligently attending youth training centers and youth schools,25 and conducting shūyō (self-cultivation, moral training) roundtable discussions.26

Such reports enhanced the symbolic status of rural youth.

War Mobilization

In the 1930s, when the imperial government repeatedly emphasized a grave national crisis and a time of emergency, the Rural Revitalization Campaign and war mobilization virtually merged into one. Together they brought about a torrent of programs, slogans, and regulations that overwhelmed the rural population. In fact, war was intrinsic to the success of the rural campaign.

Scenes of soldiers returning to rural villages, for example, reminded the villagers that the rural life was part of a bigger imperial effort. Villages organized parades and ceremonies, in which soldiers’ injuries and reunions with their families became a spectacle for public consumption.

Kahoku shinpō reported “the ecstatic welcoming” in every village and town. The reports usually did not discuss where they fought and what they did, but focused on their honorable returns (and non-returns) instead.27

22 “Kenka yūben taikai,” Kahoku shinpō, August 13, 1929, 4. 23 “Ichi-seinen no funtō doryoku de mohan nōzeiku ga umareru,” Kahoku shinpō, April 24, 1930, 4. 24 “Heishi nana-mei no otegara,” Kahoku shinpō, April 24, 1930, 4. 25 For example, “Yūryō seikunsei,” Kahoku shinpō, May 5, 1930, 6. 26 For example, “Shūyō zadankai,” Kahoku shinpō, September 9, 1930, 6. 27 “Namida aratani kokyō e: eirei wa eikyū ni nemuru,”Kahoku shinpō, March 8, 1932, 4. “Suihai o kawashita Dōkyō no yūshi,” Kahoku shinpō, February, 2, 1933, 7. “Gaisen yūshi o mukaete miyo kakuchi no kyōkiburi,” Kahoku shinpō, January 18, 1933, 8.

#139 The army consciously linked rural villages and battlefronts to reinforce the image of the

“hamlet soldier.” After the Manchurian Incident in 1931, in which Japanese military initiated an assault in China and established Manchukuo the following year, farm youth received more daily military drills. The annual army inspection of students of youth training centers in each village became another village spectacle.28 Hundreds and thousands of young men, mainly students of youth training centers or youth schools, conducted large-scale combat games with real weapons.29 Schoolchildren observed these practices, participating in the excitement about the war and the prospect of becoming soldiers.30 Women in the village took part in these practices as nurses.31 Once conscripted, enlisted men were organized according to their home regions to maintain cohesion of the unit. Soldiers were encouraged to write to the training officers and seinendan members back home.32 Through these measures, soldiers achieved respect in rural society, and the villagers eagerly awaited news of the soldiers at the front.

Army conscription, a hinge of the deep connection between the military and rural societies, began to bear the seriousness of wartime as the decade progressed. In 1936, two young men in Shida county submitted blood-signed applications. Examinees shaved their heads at the conscription exam site to demonstrate their determination. The newspaper described the year’s

28 Itō, Ōnuki-mura monogatari, 107-108. 29 For example, “Gōgun, seikunsei tō roppyaku-mei: sōretsuna sentō enshū,” Kahoku shinpō, March 8, 1932, 4. “Eai-gawa o hasande hakunetsusen tenkai,” Kahoku shinpō, March 28, 1932, 4. “Sida, Tōda no kōchi o hasami sōretsunaru mogi enshū,” Kahoku shinpō, March 3, 1935, 8. 30 “Taikyaku, shingeki o tsuzuke sōretsu na shigaisen tenkai,” Kahoku shinpō, April 10, 1932, 4. 31 “Ōshii Yamato nadeshiko,” Kahoku shinpō, December 12, 1935, 8. 32 Kikuchi Keiichi, Nanasen-tsū no gunji yūbin: Takahashi Minejirō to nōmin heishi tachi (Tokyo: Hakujusha, 1983) introduces 7,000 letters that soldiers sent to their village and the local leader. A newspaper article “Chūtaichō no onjō ni kanpun no shōshūhei: kataku musubu chihō to guntai,” Kahoku shinpō December 12, 8 also reveals the close ties deliberately built between villages and battlefronts.

#140 inspection as “reflecting the time of urgency.”33 This was not triggered only by wartime propaganda and social pressure. As an official policy, the army gave the veterans an advantage in finding jobs in the midst of severe unemployment. The army itself took initiatives to allot jobs to them, and the government encouraged their employers to re-hire them.34 Owing to its achievement in the national-imperial expansion and its role in providing employment, the presence of the army inevitably increased in the impoverished countryside.

Localization and Centralization

As the “hamlet soldiers” and “village Japan” were being constructed simultaneously through the tie between rural villages and the army, youth training institutions underwent further centralization. In the late 1920s, the national network of seinendan empowered average farm youth and allowed them to imagine rural modernity. At the same time, dynamics in local villages were where rural youth built social capital and enhanced their status. The seinendan and other youth training institutions operated under the tension between the centralizing (or nationalizing) and decentralizing (localizing) forces. During wartime mobilization, however, the former overwhelmed the latter.

In the early 1930s, localities were still important. Local history, folklore, and folk art movements were popular across the country.35 In educational practices, localization and de- centralization were a national trend since the late 1920s. Seinendan groups were often regarded as belonging to localities, compared to youth training centers and youth schools. “The essence of

33 “Hijō jikyoku hanei: Shida-gun chōhei kensa kessho shigansha ni-mei,” Kahoku shinpō, May 11, 1936, 8. 34 “Jotaihei no shūshoku kōseiseki,” Kahoku shinpō, Febuary 4, 1931. “Jotaigo shisshoku ni naku heieki gimusha o hogo,” Kahoku shinpō, March 3, 1931, 5. 35 See Louise Young on “regionalist movements.” Louise Young, Beyond The Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern life in Interwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 141-187.

#141 youth training centers is clearly the educational facility of the state… All the educational methods there are conducted by certain educators based on a set of laws. In comparison, the seinendan are completely private groups and are not subject to any legal constraints,” Nagato

Raizō, a social education official in Miyagi prefecture argued, “the seinendan, viewed from their history, emerged with various local characteristics of each village and town, as well as of each region.”36

Yet, despite Nagato’s perception, the localities owed much to nationalizing, centralizing forces. The seinendan received as much supervision by the prefectural and national officials as the youth training centers. The government ministries had eagerly intervened into seinendan activities even before 1924, when the Greater Japan Seinendan Federation was established as a national network of the local seinendan. Particularly in the Shōwa period (starting in 1926),

Emperor Hirohito frequently visited the ceremonies and sports festivals of seinendan members, emphasizing the direct connection between rural youth and Imperial state. The national network of seinendan became a single body, the Greater Japan Seinendan, in 1939 and expanded to integrate groups of younger children [shōnendan] in 1941. Through these national networks, localities represented by village seinendan units were studied, compiled, and presented.37 The premise of locally-driven and centuries-old seinendan was itself a product of nationalization of the seinendan institution.

One project of the Miyagi seinendan, the establishment of a statue of Date Masamune, shows how the emphasis on locality rested on centralizing forces. Miyagi’s social education

36 Nagato Raizō, “Seinen kunren shikō 3,” Miyagi kyōiku 333 (March 1927): 30-32. 37 Kumagai Tatsujirō, Dai Nihon Seinendan shi (Tōkyō: Kumagai Tatsujirō, 1942), 109-112, 227-262.

#142 official Nagato Raizō initiated the movement to construct the Date statue in 1930 in the hope of instilling local pride in young people in impoverished rural villages.38 The most popular historical hero in Miyagi, Date’s legendary life was known to all Miyagi youth—losing an eye in childhood, succeeding the lordship of the Sendai domain at 18, expanding the domain through remarkable military feats at the age 23, and leading Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea of the 1590s.39 To celebrate the 300th anniversary of his death, 50,000 seinendan members raised funds for the statue by laboring at various construction sites and soliciting donations from politicians and business leaders, including Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo.40 On May 16,

1935, a bronze equestrian statue, sculpted by a Miyagi artist Komuro Tōru, traveled from Tokyo and arrived in Sendai. The regional newspaper Kahoku shinpō reported the excitement over his

“homecoming” for many weeks. As much as it manifested local pride, this project was only possible because of the national seinendan network, which centrally organized the labor force and brought the statue of the hero from metropolitan Tokyo.

The emphasis on local characteristics in education originally started as liberal activism by schoolteachers, challenging standardization in the late 1920s. In Tōhoku, teachers in Akita launched a movement to teach local languages, histories, and characteristics in the journal Hoppō kyōiku (Northern Education) in 1930. They argued that they reflected “the trend of educational de-centralization” and aimed at “abandoning conceptual discussion and abstract theories and exploring the right path in concrete realities.”41 Miyagi Education Journal also published many

38 Utsumi Teitarō, ed., Miyagi-ken seinen kyōiku no ayumi (Sendai: Miyagi-ken kyōiku iinkai, 1987), 110. 39 For example, “Saitō Sōjirō, “Date Masamune kō no igyō o shinobu,” Miyagi seinen (February, 1933): 8-13. 40 Utsumi Teitarō, 110-115; “Hondan no seishi o kazaru hanso kōdōzō jomakushiki jōkyō” and others, Miyagi seinen 3 (July 1935): 1-4. 41 “Kantōgen: warera ga shimei,” Hoppō kyōiku 1.1 (February 1930): 1.

#143 articles that argued that one’s love for a native place [kyōdoai] should be the basis of education.

A teacher in Igu county argued, “The start of education must center on the native place.”42

Elementary schools put up slogans, such as “understand one’s native place, love one’s native place, and develop one’s native place,” and hung paintings of Date Masamune.43 Authors in the journal started to embrace a new perspective on the Tōhoku dialect, which had been a target of

“correction” in the early part of the century. Asserting that even “the Tokyō language is another dialect,” another teacher stressed the importance of regional dialects and argued that “it is not standard Japanese that vividly expresses the emotional lives of local people, but the language of the native place, or in other words, the dialect.”44 The appreciation of the Tōhoku dialect continued in the late 1930s, with some applying a new adjective, “beautiful,” to “Tōhoku language.”45

Agrarian values concealed the potential conflict between the liberal-localizing movement and standardizing central forces. Every non-urban region claimed its value based on its commitment to agriculture and fishery production, the moral quality of villagers, and the presence of strong and healthy young men. Shida county was no exception. Kahoku shinpō’s specialized local report in 1936 featured Shida county “in the throne of Agricultural Miyagi.” It emphasized that Furukawa city, famous for tenant disputes and political contestations between socialists and the government, overcame its earlier difficulties and united for the revitalization of

42 Manryū Mamoru, “Kyōdo no shizen to bunka toni rikkyaku suru seikatsu shidō 1,” Miyagi kyōiku 353 (November 1928): 21. 43 Nakata jinjō kōtō shōgakkō, “Kyōdoai no kyōiku no jissai shisetsu,” Miyagi kyōiku 368 (February 1930): 59-61. 44 Miura Mitsujirō, “Kokugo kyōiku jō kara mita hōgen to hyōjungo no mondai,” Miyagi kyōiku 423 (September 1934): 33. 45 Watanabe Ōe, “Utsukushiki Tōhokugo sono ni” Miyagi kyōiku (November 1936): 40-42.

#144 Tōhoku.46 The phrase “pillars of youth” [chūken seinen] appeared in the middle of the page, stressing the high morale of young men and reservists.47 By emphasizing these typical agrarian elements, local leaders appeared supportive of nationalizing and de-centralizing forces at the same time.

Thus “rural youth” symbolized two things in the 1930s: local pride to village leaders and the target of reform to urban educators. A research team measured the levels of intelligence of young people in an academic test in 1938, claiming that the intelligence of rural youth was significantly lower than that of city youth. In Shirai village, Chiba prefecture, a case study of the study team stated, “81% of male and 78% of female youth have lower-than-average intelligence.”48 The national leaders of seinendan, viewing rural youth as uneducated bumpkins, did not hide their attitude toward them even at a later date. They lamented about the change in the official journal, Seinen, as becoming “an earthy and fun-seeking journal with phonetic marks on kanji … that finally stimulated rural seinendan members to read.”49

Perhaps sensing the urbanites’ condescension toward rural youth cloaked in the praise of localities, Miyagi educators emphasized the usefulness of local culture to the nation as a whole.

“Native place is the nation [kokka],” one schoolteacher emphasized, “superior Miyagi people, from the national point of view, are superior Japanese people.”50 Among many theorists quoted by these Miyagi teachers, particularly popular was German geographer Karl Ritter’s claim that a

46 Ōgon no nami yureru hōjōno Ōsaki heiya nōgyō Miyagi no ōza Shida-gun,” Kahoku Shinpō Miyagi kenka ban, August 31, 1936, 8. 47 “Chihō jichi no kōjō chūken seinen ni kitai” Kahoku Shinpō Miyagi kenka ban, August 31, 1936, 8. 48 Okabe kyōiku kenkyūshitsu, Nōson ni okeru seinen kyōiku: sono mondai to hōsaku (Tokyo: Ryūginsha, 1942), 589. 49 Ozawa Shigeru, Dai Nippon Seishōnendan shi (Tokyo: Nihon seinenkan, 1970), 303. 50 Hoshino Tatsurō, “Kyōdo kyōiku, kinrō kyōiku, kōmin kyōiku,” Miyagi kyōiku 378 (December 1930): 22, 24.

#145 native land has everything necessary to study the entire earth.51 In measuring the importance of

Tōhoku in the nation, some had recourse to the rivalry between the east and the west, which

Hangai Seiju had argued in 1906 when he warned against the westward imperial expansion. “We must not make Tōhoku into Kansai-style (Osaka, Kyoto)” because “Tōhoku is, and has to remain, the root of Japan,” argued Itō Hyōgo, a schoolteacher in Miyagi.52 Proud of his origin in

Fukushima, the president of the Tokyo Science Museum claimed in 1938 that “the culture is shifting from Seinan (southwest) to Tōhoku (northeast).”53

These claims by Tōhoku leaders paradoxically revealed the difficulty in countering rapid standardization in educational methods. Since the establishment of youth training centers in

1926, through the transition to youth schools in 1935, and deep into the war mobilization of the

1940s, these schools were designed to provide uniform, nationalizing education.54 As teachers, many youth in these schools faced the mounting pressure to apply standardized methods, which quickly diminished their ability to attract younger generations. Each school struggled to raise the attendance rate in these schools. Village administrators had to lure the students in and even manipulate the numbers. “The primary importance is to raise the attendance rate, and training itself is the secondary importance,” argued a schoolmaster in Iwadeyama, Miyagi, in 1934. They attained near perfect attendance by reducing the frequency of training from four times to twice a month and by visiting each household to remind the families in advance.55 Among students,

51 Manryū Mamoru, “Kyōdo no shizen to bunka toni rikkyaku suru seikatsu shidō 1,” Miyagi kyōiku 353 (November 1928): 21-23. 52 Itō Hyōgo, “Kyōiku o kichō toshitaru Tōhoku shinkō saku,” Miyagi kyōiku (July 1937): 50-51. 53 Yamauchi Saiji, “Tōhoku seinen gakkō kyōkasho hensan kadode no kai,” Miyagi kyōiku (November 1938): 95. 54 Nagato Raizō, “Seinen kunren shikō 3,” Miyagi kyōiku 333 (March 1927): 30-32. 55 “Seikunshosei no shussekinan kaishō,” Kahoku shinpō, July 10, 1934, 8.

#146 young farmers were still exemplary. Teachers had a harder time recruiting youth in other industries—“The attendance of youth in commercial business is nearly zero,” Kahoku shinpō reported in 1935.56 As the war progressed, the army demanded greater standardization of training in youth schools. Kahoku shinpō reported in February 1941:

In order to respond to the current international situation, complete the goal of “all citizens are soldiers,” and overcome the difficulty of the times, the Sendai army division’s headquarters decided to focus its energy on youth military drill. As a guiding principle in youth schools, it will correct the students’ thought and behavior that varied according to region-specific conditions by adopting the set principle based on encouragement of the Japanese spirit and imperial rescripts. It will introduce to youth schools [a custom of] strict salute, which the Sendai division has been implementing as of primary importance in education and training in order to maintain order. At the same time, in military drills, it will hold prefecture-wide group practices, which have been 57 !previously held individually in cities and counties. On the same page of Kahoku shinpō, the Sendai division boasted about Miyagi’s highest enrollment rate of youth schools among Tōhoku prefectures— 99% of 43,320 eligible youth reportedly entered youth schools.58 Village officials had to keep up with the unrealistically high expectation to the extent that the numbers on paper ceased to mean anything. Shida village recorded the largest number of youth school students, 304 (and 65 graduates) in 1941, but lost track of the size of enrollment in 1942.59 At the time of full-scale war mobilization, even the nominal entrance of young male population to youth schools seems to have become too bothersome to compile. The energy of village officials was re-directed from training to the constant allocation of manpower to military, agricultural, and heavy industries.

56 “Totei kyōiku ni komarinuku kakuchi seinen gakkō,” Kahoku shinpō, October 28, 1935, 8. 57 “Genkaku naru keirei: rengō enshū mo zenkenteki na mononi seinen gakkō no shidō hōshin,” Kahoku shinpō, February 25, 1941, 3. 58 “Tōhoku ichi no seiseki nyūkōritsu 99%,” Kahoku shinpō, February 25, 1941, 3. 59 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi (Miyagi: Miyagi-ken Shida-gun Shida-son, 1950), 206-207.

#147 By 1943, the centralizing forces completely overwhelmed the localizing ones. Even the

“model farm villages,” which used to represent the beauty of the locale at least in theory, were now leveled with the word, “standard” [hyōjun]. Three hundred “standard farm villages” were established throughout Japan to “perform appropriate agricultural management and nurture farming families that conduct firm and long-term agriculture in response to the demands of the nation.”60 The government gave subsidies to these select villages to encourage the standardization of other villages. Local characteristics that were once praised as the basis of

“national culture” disappeared from this new program and, overall, from the wartime planned economy in the early 1940s.

National Ethos through Bodily Practice and Everyday Experience

In the localization movement of education, “home village education” [kyōdo kyōiku] had been the flagship of agrarian education. It had won currency as a desirable way of educating rural populations because it not only provided vocational and agricultural techniques, but also taught agrarian morality. “By using the home village’s historical and social materials, the home- village education aims to give children a deep impression, build upon their experiences, and establish the foundations of human character,” a teacher of Shida elementary school argued in

1932.61 But when the force of nationalization overwhelmed rural education in the 1930s, the emphasis on nurturing “character” was transformed into a focus on bodily acquisition of nationalistic spirit. As a result, “home village education,” originally intended to shift attention

60 “Honnendo wa sanbyaku-chōson go-kanen keikaku de kakudai: ‘Hyōjun nōson’ settei yōkō,” Kahoku shinpō, April 8, 1943, 2. 61 Yusa Kanehiko, “Honken shotō kyōiku no shōrai o ronzu,” Miyagi kyōiku 401 (November 1932): 61.

#148 and resources to develop local identity, was transformed into a method of inculcating nationalism through everyday life.

Eliminating the boundary between formal training time and daily life was a decisive departure from previous kyōka (moral suasion) campaigns toward fascist education.

Schoolteachers and seinendan leaders had always aimed at influencing lifestyles of children and youth, but mere “influence” was no longer enough for the nation in “wartime emergency.” To merge home and nation, “integration of training and everyday life” [kunren no seikatsuka, seikatsu no kurenka] became a new teaching philosophy in Funaoka youth training center in

Shibata county, Miyagi, in 1935. Army officers of the Sendai Division applauded its “forward- thinking” training and paid a visit to view the center’s activities, mainly “military-style” agricultural practices. They also visited the students’ homes to study how their changed behavior at home affected their family members.62

The so-called China Incident of 1937, which marked the initiation of total war against

China, intensified the trend of integration of military training and everyday life. Kahoku shinpō printed in large fonts that the situation of all-out war was an “Unprecedented National Crisis,” which made “Youth’s Mission Critical.”63 The Shida county seinendan held a convention with its

2,000 members, just like thousands of other seinendan groups around the empire, to pronounce the state of emergency and make an oath to commit to the war effort.64 “All of the activities of youth in Shirai village have to be filled with national significance and penetrated by the spirit of

62 “‘Kunren no seikatsuka’ Funaoka seinendan no shisetsu keiei gaiyō: tsukerareta kenka ichi no origami,” Kahoku shinpō, January 16,1935, 8. 63 “Imaya mizou no kokunan: seinen no shimei omoshi,” Kahoku shinpō, August 12, 1937, 8. 64 “Kokka sōdōin hijō jijkyoku o kyōchō: Shida-gun seinendan taikai sengen,” Kahoku shinpō, August 21, 1937, 8.

#149 devotion to the state,” argued the 1938 study on rural youth education.65 It emphasized that seinendan should focus on “collective practice of daily life” [shūdanteki seikatsu jissen] as a means for intensive moral training.66

In order to implement “collective practice of daily life,” many youth training institutions turned themselves into dojo (a training facility for martial arts), where individuals spent days together and received strict supervision of every aspect of their daily routine. Dojo facilities, where “living together” was central, spread around the country.67 In December 1938, Katō

Hisanosuke made a large donation to build a dojo in the local Hachiman shrine yard in the hope of “producing youth with iron bodies and iron spirits.” It served multiple purposes as a center of youth’s moral training: it was a facility for group exercises of village male and female youth, a venue for lectures and speeches, a dojo for martial arts, and a memorial hall of the China

Incident that displayed photos of the village’s heroic war dead.68 As the prospect of war became bleaker, elementary schools were also turned into dojos that emphasized bodily acquisition of nationalistic spirit over learning. “The 180-degree change of education!!,” a schoolteacher in

Sendai advocated in 1942. “It is extremely outdated if you regard only intellectual instruction as the value of schools.” Against the criticism “that school beats bells and drums, having too much of religious flavor,” he stressed that the “training of all aspects of children’s lives” required integration of training and everyday life. Many youth schools adopted the dojo-style training as well. A teacher at a youth school in Kurihara county reported in November 1943 that its mission

65 Okabe kyōiku kenkyūshitsu, Nōson ni okeru seinen kyōiku, 495. 66 Ibid., 72. 67 On dojo-style training and “integration of training and everyday life,” see Terasaki Masao, ed., Sōryokusen taisei to kyōiku: kōkokumin ‘rensei’ no rinen to jissen (Tokyo: Tokyō daugaku shuppankai, 1987). 68 “Hachiman dōjō: Shida sonchō seinen ni okuru,” Kahoku shinpō, December 14, 1938, 4.

#150 was to “make youth aware of the meanings of their work and their mission at their workplaces and complete their mission, through every possible means, with burning loyalty in response to imperial benevolence.” Their training ranged from radio listening comprehension and military marches to monetary savings and lectures on imperial agrarianism.69 In the 1940s, the original emphasis on the “local” in home village education was replaced by stress on the young “body” that knew no separation between private and national spheres.

Rural Imperialism

When both localizing and centralizing forces defined their goal as establishing a strong nation [kokka], the word nation meant the empire. The presence of the empire was inflated in young farmers’ everyday lives not only through wartime educational methods. The expanding imperial frontiers in northern China, like the battlefronts, were closely linked to Japanese rural villages. Japan’s imperial expansion was informed by agrarian ideals from the beginning, but the imperial control over Manchuria in the 1930s magnified the discourse of an agriculture-centered imperialism. Schoolteachers argued that the seinendan in the 1930s differed from those in Meiji times: “Today’s Japan shows a superlative presence as a champion of East Asia and world leader, so the seinendan in the Japanese countryside should not remain in the era of wakarenchū (hamlet youth associations), seinenkai (youth groups in Meiji), shojokai (young women’s groups in the

1910s) as in the thought of early or mid-Meiji.”70 They envisioned the seinendan to transform themselves as the scale of imperialism expanded in the late 1930s.

69 Karino Rikuzō, “Dōjō chūshin seinen rensei no jittai,” Miyagi kyōiku 536(November 1943): 45-48. 70 Shimogōri Heiji, Sennin kyōin nōson seinengakkō no keiei (Tokyo: Daiichi shuppan kyōkai, 1939), 43-44.

#151 In fact, the empire in the 1930s affected the everyday lives of rural Japanese in a new way because of government migration programs to Manchuria. The territory in northeastern

China, Manchuria was called “the new paradise” and was presented as a panacea for the widespread rural problems in the 1930s. Villagers had faced a shortage of arable land especially when the rural population expanded during the depression.71 To ease the population pressure, an agrarian activist Katō Kanji, with support by the Kwangtung Army (the Japanese army stationed in northeastern China) commanders Ishihara Kanji and Tōmiya Kaneo, advocated and launched the Manchuria colonization program in 1932.72 The program provided Japanese farmers with army drills and agricultural training in the Uchihara training center in Ibaraki prefecture and then relocated them as armed agricultural colonizers. After sending 423 farmers from the Tōhoku region and Nagano prefecture to Manchuria in the first year,73 the central government planned to send millions of farmers in the next ten years. The media, including the popular magazine Ie no hikari (The Light of the Family), introduced success stories of emigrants in one issue after another, popularizing Manchuria as a destination.74 Between 1932 and 1936, the Miyagi

71 Sandra Wilson points out that scholars had perceived the problem of overpopulation in as early as the 1880s, and that the government recognized the population problem in the late 1920s, establishing a “Board of Inquiry into Population and Food Problems” in 1927. Sandra Wilson, “The ‘New Paradise’: Japanese Emigration to Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s,” The International History Review 17, no.2 (May 1995): 251-5; Abe Hiroki, “Nōson no nayami” Miyagi kyōiku (October 1936): 32-33. See also Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 307-351. 72 Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 318-321. 73 Īda-shi rekishi kenkyūjo, ed., Manshū imin: Īda Shimoina karano messēji (Tokyo: Gendai shiryō shuppan, 2007), 31-33. 74 See Sandra Wilson, “Bureaucrats and Villagers in Japan: Shimin and the Crisis of the Early 1930s,” Social Science Japan Journal 1, no.1 (April 1998): 121-140 for the difference in views on Manchuria between Shimin and Ie no hikari.

#152 prefectural government sent 12,419 emigrants in the official record, a fifth largest group in the country.75

In reality, Miyagi officials, although they frantically recruited volunteers, had no concrete evidence that Manchuria was the solution to rural poverty. Kimura Tadashi, a Miyagi official, did not conceal his lack of confidence in a 1931 speech: “I know nothing about Manchuria. I have been told only that Manchuria has limitless land and limitless resources. And there is always an insistence that Manchuria is Japan’s life-line; that we must protect the rights and interests earned in the battles of 1904-5. It is a very abstract thing.”76 Nonetheless, the mobilization was accelerated every year. The prefectural government set up a “Miyagi village” in Manchuria, consisting of a few settlers from each village so that emigrants had more than immediate kinship to rely on. Some villages promoted migration more enthusiastically than others and created their

“branch villages” in Manchuria. Nangō village, also called the “best migration village of Japan,” was the first in the country to plan to establish a branch village.77 Nangō’s move fanned Miyagi’s

“migration fever,” and encouraged other villages like Ōnuki to hold lectures, motion-picture showings, and hamlet meetings to emulate Nangō’s collective colonization on the continent.78

Since the target population of emigration consisted of young male farmers, the seinendan played a central role in mobilization. The seinendan were the most reliable organization to prepare model migrants from the viewpoint of the government and the Kwangtung Army.

75 Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 329. 76 Kimira Tadashi, “Manshū shokumin kyōkai Sendai shibu ni tsuite” (June 28, 1931), in Kimura Tadashi sensei kōenshū ‘Sonchō jūnen,’ ed. Kimura Tadashi sensei kōenshū Sonchō jūnen kankōkai (Sendai, 1937), 148-9, translated and quoted in Wilson, “New Paradise,” 265. 77 “Nihon ichi no iminmura Nangō ga ‘bunson’ o kensetsu,” Kahoku shinpō, July 22, 1937. 78 “Manshū no tenchi ni Ōnuki-kyō kensetsu: ōi ni imin netsu wo aotte,” Kahoku shinpō, May 21, 1937, 8.

#153 Japanese bureaucrats, particularly those in the South Manchurian Railway Company, were concerned about a large number of unemployed youth going to Manchuria with a dream of easy money. The magazine Ie no hikari warned that there were an increasing number of waitresses from cafes and bars, as well as prostitutes, in Manchuria.79 To encourage the migration of farm youth for agricultural colonization, all levels of government offices worked with the corresponding levels of seinendan associations. At the national level, the Japan Youth Hall in

Tokyo hosted a large celebration for the departure of the migrants from 1932.80 In 1937, the

Greater Japan Seinendan Federation established a “colonization department” to facilitate overseas migration and submitted to the cabinet a policy recommendation to establish the Young

Volunteer Corps for the Development of Manchuria-Mongolia [Manmō kaitaku seishōnen giyūgun, or the Volunteer Corps]. The seinendan leaders used every venue to promote the

Volunteer Corps, such as convening prefectural representatives to discuss the guidelines of recruitment and advertising the Volunteer Corps in the official seinendan journal Seinen (Youth), the Japan Youth Newspaper, and the popular series the Youth Card, and so on. As a result, more than 20,000 young men joined the Volunteer Corps and relocated themselves to Manchuria in

1938.81

The prefectural level of seinendan associations had already been taking youth to the frontier of the empire. Since 1925, the Miyagi seinendan had been organizing study trips to

Manchuria and Korea. These trips supposedly provided an opportunity to “transcend national borders, reflect upon the state of our empire, feel the customs of the continent, correct our

79 Wilson, “The New Paradise,” 269-71. 80 Īda-shi rekishi kenkyūjo, Manshū imin, 33. 81 Kumagai, Dai Nihon Seinendan shi, 381-382.

#154 perceptions of Manchuria and Korea, mourn at the battle sites, and see the activities of compatriots.”82 After the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the 206 former participants of these study trips formed the Miyagi Youth Manchuria-Korea Group to show their firm support to those “who risk their lives defending the lifeline of the Yamato race,” and initiated a variety of publications, lectures, and study groups.83 Miyagi seinen (Miyagi Youth), the official Miyagi seinendan newsletter, was the main forum for their activities. In fact, the Miyagi seinen and the Miyagi

Education Journal constantly reported “impressions” of Manchuria, Korea, and occasionally

Taiwan by teachers and youth who visited these places. Their experiences of riding the trains with passengers of different ethnicities, passing through dangerous zones where the Japanese were often attacked by bandits, and walking among the neon signs, bars, and jazz music in Jilin depicted the adventurous atmosphere of their trips from Korea to Manchuria. At the same time, this unfamiliar space filled with flashy hyper-modern symbols did not feel completely foreign to these visitors owing to the presence of Miyagi settlers there.84 The study trip participants often obtained help from Miyagi business owners for accommodation, meals, and tour guides. Reports on the agricultural settlement in Manchuria similarly employed a combination of the unfamiliar and familiar. “We use the machines of Western nations for agricultural tools, which are unimaginable in Japan,” wrote a settler from Miyagi in the fourth migration program.85 By having Miyagi’s co-locals introduce their experience, the “unseen scale” of agriculture appeared more graspable to the young readers. Scholar Hyung Ok Park has argued that the settlement of

82 “Miyagi seinen Man-Sen kai,” Miyagi seinen 2 (February 1933): 50. 83 Ibid., 49-52. 84 For example, see Miura Yoshinori, “Man-Sen kengakuki,” a series of articles in Miyagi seinen between December 1935 and March 1936. “Manshū ijūchi shisatsu nisshi shō,” Miyagi kyōiku (February 1940): 44-64. 85 Shin Toyonori, “Hirake! Warera no Man-Mō,” Miyagi seinen 14 (July 1936): 9.

#155 Korean farmers in the Kando region of Manchuria functioned as cells in the “osmotic” expansion of the capitalist-empire.86 Miyagi’s emigrants to Manchuria created a similar process of

“osmosis” in that these migrants transformed not only the boundary of the empire, but also that of Miyagi’s rural villages.

At the village level, fraternal bonds that grew among seinendan members served to bring the larger imperial state closer to village everyday life. Many young people who emigrated to the colonies continued to submit their essays to their home village’s seinendan newsletters. Some newsletters allowed overseas contributors to use their authority to give a “real account” of the empire. Especially in the 1920s, when migration was not such a prevalent phenomenon, seinendan members living in an “outer territory [gaichi],” as the colonies were called, were a rare source of first-hand accounts. In the Akita city seinendan newsletters, for example, Satō

Yūtarō, a member living in northern Korea, shared his opinion. Cautioning the reader against the mistaken image of Koreans, Satō described the “real” Koreans as “loyal and humane,” although

“some have the slyness of the loser of a war.” His chauvinism came out when he concluded that

“it was sufficient for those in the past to just be the conqueror [seifukusha], but we have an additional duty now: the assimilation of the conquered [hiseifukusha].”87 As living in outer territories became more common a phenomenon over time, and seinendan newsletters reflected that trend. Kanno Sukeo, a settler in Taiwan, submitted his essays to the seinendan newsletter of his home village, Edano in Igu county around 1935. Kanno gave no sign of being a settler other than the word “Taiwan” in front of his name. His essay deplored that people with high morality

86 Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 24-63. 87 Satō Yūtarō, “Genzai no Senjin ni tsuite,” Akita-shi seinendan danpō 3 (November 1926): 1.

#156 often fell into poverty. It downplayed the unique environment of living in Taiwan by sharing a universal concern of rural youth.88 Essays like this flattened various experiences in the empire and shrunk them into one narrative of struggling rural youth. Through these exchanges and personal ties that grew among them, the expansive empire became a familiar, graspable world to village seinendan members.

Japan’s conquest of Manchuria gave rural villages pioneer status not only in the national discourse but also in the imperial framework. Young generations in the countryside, in particular, nurtured a deeper sense of agrarian imperialism. They came to believe that their responsibilities extended from their hamlets and villages, beyond the Japanese archipelago, reaching the frontier land of northern China and Manchuria. They were told to “love their native place” because “the earnest love for their native place… is the mother of the development of the continent.”89 They were also told to “raise self-awareness” as imperial settlers in the continent and abstain from alcohol, violence, and arrogant behavior in order to cultivate admiration for Japan among

Chinese (and Korean) locals.90 All aspects of their lives, even their wedding, were mobilized to advertise imperial settlement. Nangō village chose brides for thirteen migrant volunteers and conducted a group wedding in February 1937. The wedding ceremony at the Nangō shrine was to “further propel the accomplishment of the village goal,” which was “emigration to

Manchuria.” The brides wore monpe work trousers and “absolutely no make-up,” to symbolize the spirit of Manchurian migration.91 Thus, village seinendan members found themselves in the

88 Igu-gun Edano-mura seinendan, Danpō 11 (April 1935): no page number. 89 Saitō Jūrō, “Seinen gakkō ‘kyōdo’ no ichikōsatsu,” Miyagi kyōiku (June 1940): 21. 90 “Shinken na seinen nomi ima no tairiku wa kangei,” Kahoku shinpō, November 2, 1939, 7. 91 Gosode, “Manchū imin gōdō shinzen kekkonshiki,” Miyagi seinen (April 1937): 76-79.

#157 midst of the emigration campaign, both as mobilizing forces and as mobilized subjects. Teenage boys were recruited to join the Volunteer Corps to go to Manchuria. Female seinendan members received training as “brides of the continent,” attending lectures on childbearing and nutrition science as well as volunteering at construction sites.92 The Japanese seinendan, which used to operate separately from their counterparts in the colonies, started in the late 1930s to regularly cross the ocean and meet other youth in and outside Manchuria.

In addition to their ties to Manchuria, the seinendan symbolized the imperial power through their connection with the Hitler Youth. Fascist movements in Europe had already captured attention of young and old, as well as ideological right and left in Japan in the 1920s and 30s.93 Both the national seinendan magazine Seinen (Youth, previous Teikoku seinen,

Imperial Youth) and village seinendan newsletters saw Mussolini and Hitler as superior leaders.

In September 1938, the seinendan and the Hitler Youth exchanged visits to tour around each other’s empire.94 Twelve members of the Hitler Youth, headed by Reinhold Schulze, were welcomed enthusiastically by Japanese crowds everywhere they went during their three-month travel in the Japanese empire. Their brief stop at Sendai on September 11 became a regional spectacle. Kahoku shinpō published photos of German youth in the famous Jugend uniform:

“The five hours the Hitler Jugend spent in Sendai, the city of forests, was filled with

[expressions] of Japanese-German friendship by all 220,000 residents. Enthusiasm for the youth of our ally followed and boiled hot. Sendai was plunged into a whirlpool of breathtaking

92 “‘Tairiku no hanayome’ yōsei,” Kahoku shinpō, March 30, 1939, 4. 93 See Reto Hofmann, “The Fascist Reflection: Japan and Italy, 1919-1950” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2010) on this point. The popularity of fascism was not limited to the Japanese audience. Many Korean students supported Hitler as well. For example, Kwon Sǔng-rak, “Na nǔn Hit’ǔllǒ rǔl sungsang hada,” Hakdǔng 14 (March 1935): 5-7. 94 “Nichidoku seishōnendan no kōkan,” Miyagi Seinen 37 (June 1938): 1.

#158 excitement for five hours.”95 The Shida village newsletter reported the news: “The Jugend sang the German national anthem to the Sendai seinendan musical band, and then [the seinendan] sang Kimi ga yo (the Japanese national anthem) in return.” After a number of speeches, “to introduce the local arts, the city seinendan performed a sword dance, the young women’s seinendan sang Sansa shigure, and it finished with a children’s performance. The Jugend sang the Nazi party song, the Jugend song, and so forth. In a harmonious atmosphere with a stream of solemn feeling, we gave three shouts of banzai (“long live”) for Germany, and Mr. Schulze led three shouts of banzai for the Greater Japanese Empire.”96 The appearance of the Hitler Youth impressed the public and raised its confidence in seinendan associations in representing a global power on a par with Germany. These exchanges symbolized a new vision of internationalism, and were reported even in remote villages like Shida. After Japan walked out of the League of

Nations and isolated itself from other Western powers in 1933, the exchanges between the seinendan and the Hitler Youth may have conveyed the public Japan’s tie with Europe’s new rising power.

Individuals in Fascist Mobilization

How did village youth react to these forces of agrarian, imperial, and military mobilization? This becomes a difficult question to answer because of the merging of private and national spheres in wartime mobilization. Local contexts and personal motivations were deeply submerged under nationalistic slogans. Everyone was occupied producing agricultural and industrial goods, participating in military drills, attending neighborhood meetings, and

95 “Matsukoto hisashiki meihō no tomo: Kinō Tōhoku no yūto Sendai hōmon,” Kahoku shinpō, September 12, 1938. 96 Furukawa shishi hensan iinkai, ed., Furukawa shishi dai 9-kan shiryō IV: kindai gendai (Sendai: Furukawa-shi, 2005), 148-149.

#159 compensating for the loss of critical manpower to military conscription. During this time, the local social sphere quickly disappeared, and the links between individuals and the state became more direct and organized hierarchically.

It appears that the generation that lived through the rise of “rural youth” in the 1920s made the transition to wartime rural imperialism and militarism without a major rupture. The personal records of Katō Einojō, the landlord’s son of Shida, indicate no major shift but only an acceleration of his belief in the power of rural youth. Having become a semi-public figure by the late 1930s, Katō’s life revolved around active participation in war mobilization. His full embrace of wartime rhetoric reveals not only what messages reached his village, but also how individuals of his generation, class, and gender consumed fascism with a degree of enthusiasm.

Katō Einojō, already 33 years of age when Japan launched all-out war in 1937, took

Japan’s “state of emergency” seriously as a “pillar” of Aratanome hamlet, Shida village. Because he failed the conscription exam in the 1920s owing to his height, he remained in the village in the 1940s even as the war intensified and most of the youth had enlisted. He served in many official positions related to agricultural administration, education, and hamlet governance. After completing a lecture course on “the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in June 1941 and another on “Leadership in the Time of Crisis and Self-Awareness of National Subjects” in

October 1942, he became the head of village sōnendan (adult associations) in 1943.97

Katō had already acquired skill and reputation as a hamlet leader through his experience of leading his 4-H club. Once he took charge of hamlet affairs, he frequently wrote and circulated hamlet newsletters to report donation quotas, surveys to be conducted, rules of the new

97 Katō Haruhiko (Einojō’s son) donated files of his certificates and appointment letters among others to the Furukawa shish hensan iinkai. These materials (“Katō-ke bunsho”) are available for viewing at Ōsaki City Hall.

#160 national health insurance, venues and quantities of rationing of goods, and detailed plans for agricultural coops.98 These writings reveal his enthusiasm for playing a leadership role that was already apparent in his earlier youth group activities. The rebelliousness that had characterized his youth group, however, was replaced by new confidence as a figure of authority. Kahoku shinpō reported his leadership in promoting the war effort in 1943: Katō gathered heads of households to explain the grave national food shortage. He promised to contribute 20% of his own rice holdings to the hamlet’s donation quota, begging others to cooperate with him. He also argued that “it is a shame for farmers” to receive rice rations. Under Katō’s initiative, Aratanome residents made a collective oath that they would resort to other foods in case of rice shortage in their households.99

Slogans on “youth” and “farmers” continued to attract Katō’s attention. Omoto, the private youth group journal he edited in 1931, had already featured the feelings of proud, young farmers and their determination to work hard in “a farmer’s poem” and “a letter to the enlisted soldier.” The focus on youth and hard work smoothly merged into the rhetoric of total mobilization and intensified over time. He was surrounded by the rhetoric of fighting “rural youth.” Declared in the cover of the meeting minute of Shida Country Imperial Rule Assistance

Association in May 1941, “Youth is the heat and oil for the flame of our leaders!”100 The “oath of food production increase” by the Shida village sōnendan was printed in handouts:

Today food is also a weapon.

98 Some of them are reprinted in Furukawa shishi hensan iinkai, Furukawa shishi dai 9-kan shiryō IV. 99 “Jinushisan ni makeruna,” Kahoku shinpō, April9, 1943, 4. 100 “Taisei yokusankai shidagun shibu dai-3 kai kyōryoku kaigi” (May 18, 1941) stored in Katō-ke bunsho, Ōsaki city hall.

#161 We know that one grain of rice and barley, or one chunk of potato, is equivalent to one !airplane and one flying bullet that determines victory or defeat in the war. We are farmers. Facing the severe war situation and entering the harvest season, now is autumn when we farmers must all stand up. We shall do our best to reach the production goal, firmly !determined to complete the hamlet’s assigned obligation of agricultural donation. Farms are our final battleground. Regarding them as our fighting field, we rely on and help each other to overcome the hardship. We make an oath to the world that we shall absolutely achieve food production 101 !increase for the sake of victory. He regularly pasted articles in scrapbooks that elevated the importance of farmers, including one from Yomiuri Hōchi shinbun written by a leading economist Tominaga Yoshio. It stressed the significant role played by the 50 million farming population in Japan, Taiwan, and

Korea, and demanded them to sacrifice more, particularly in giving up their own food consumption to “even out the levels of hunger of all national subjects.” Katō underlined these points in red pencil.102 He also made a number of handwritten notes on Hōtokukai lectures, perhaps in preparation for his own lectures to give to hamlet residents.

The enthusiasm of local leaders like Katō, repeated in almost all hamlets and villages around the country, characterized the Japanese wartime mobilization as fascist.103 Even without a charismatic leader or a popular fascist party, the Japanese government enjoyed unprecedentedly wide popular participation and support. Like Katō, their enthusiasm owed a great degree to the

101 Shida-son yokusan sōnendan, “Shokuryō zōsan no chikai,” stored in Katō-ke bunsho, Ōsaki City hall. 102 Tominaga Yoshio, “Nōson ni gekisu,” Yomiuri Hōchi September 17, 1944, 2. Found in Aratanome burakukai, “Taisei yokusan roku” notebook in Katō-ke bunsho, Ōsaki City Hall. 103 I agree with Kerry Smith on that, despite the structural differences, the ways in which lives of Japanese citizens were regulated and devoted to meet the cause of the state were equivalent to fascist mobilization seen in Germany or Italy. Smith, A Time of Crisis, 328.

#162 appeal of agrarianism and youthfulness that had built up over the decades preceding the total war.104

In addition to the rhetoric of youth and agrarianism, another element characterized village mobilization in the 1930s and 40s: individual competitions. Fascist mobilization depended on a congregation of competitions among individuals at the local level. The quotas of rice donation and savings assigned to Aratanome hamlet by Shida village was further broken down to quotas for individual households. Compared to the quota system in force during the Russo-Japanese

War, which used neighborhoods as units, the quotas during WWII appear to have been more individualized even though “neighborhood associations (tonari gumi)” were formed to watch each other.105 Katō made clean tables and charts to visualize the achievement of each household every year. The collected results were then used to make a hamlet-to-hamlet comparison. As a hamlet leader, Katō Einojō took pride in completing, and even outpacing, his own quota. This competition increased pressure at every level, and, as a result, maintained a high morale among the people. The mobilization in the 1930s and 40s might appear to have reinforced the traditional function of hamlet community control that had developed over centuries, but modern collectivism was in fact based on individual responsibility, made possible by meticulous, standardized surveys and monitoring methods used only in modern times.

104 Smethurst makes a similar argument regarding Japanese militarism. He argues that the army established a wide support over the course of the 1920s by utilizing the tight, authoritarian hamlet organizations, creating “a social basis” for militarism. I agree that rural villages became a foundation for militaristic mobilization, but disagree with Smethurst on the point that Japanese rural hamlet essentially did not change throughout the prewar period. Richard Smethurst, A Social Basis For Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 105 See Simon Partner, “Peasants into Citizens? The Meiji Village in the Russo-Japanese War,” Monumenta Nipponica 62, no.2 (Summer 2007): 190 on the quota system during the Russo-Japanese War.

#163 While the fascist state emphasized the virtue of collectivism, people rationalized their collaboration with the state in the name of the empowerment of individuals. In a way, this was an expansion of the dynamic seen in the Rural Youth Industry, except that now the state attempted to eliminate the sphere outside its influence altogether. Agrarian youth had formed the Rural

Youth Industry by seeking rural modernity and personal success. They deployed the rhetoric of the state and used the global trend of youth activism to their benefits. In the 1940s, when any voice that challenged the goal of the state met with immediate harsh punishment, such freedom of co-optation was gone. But at the same time, the individuality of all people was supposed to blossom through the state. Those whose voice had been submerged earlier, such as children and unmarried farmwomen, in particular, could establish a new status in the new symbiosis. A children’s magazine, Weekly Junior Nation [Shūkan shōkokumin], argued that children were even more responsible than adults for carrying out the war and shouldering the future of the empire.

Children who grew up during wartime later wrote that they felt “happiness and pride” in believing the rhetoric and becoming a “perfect imperial subject.”106 Young women also viewed themselves as having new leverage. Ōnuki village’s female seinendan members established a

“non-marriage alliance,” pledging that they would not marry men who did not attend military drills in youth training centers, saying “without military drills, they are not ‘men’!” They attempted to confront the dominance of masculinity by turning their marriage decision into a chance to judge their male counterparts.107

106 Ōkado Masakatsu, “Kodomo tachi no sensō, kodomo tachi no sego,” in Iwanami kōza Ajia Taiheiyō sensō 6: Nichijō seikatsu no naka no sōryokusen, ed. Kurawsawa Aiko et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2006), 96-101. The original quote is in Yamanaka Hisashi, Bokura shō kokumin (Tokyo: Henkyōsha, 1974), 266. 107 Itō, Ōnuki-mura monogatari, 94.

#164 In this way, the escalating wartime mobilization challenged established social statuses, including the status accorded to healthy young men. The last years of the war destabilized another longstanding social hierarchy—that of the urban and the rural. Food supplies were in critical shortage and urban areas were targeted by daily air raids.108 Urban populations rushed to find family connections in rural villages so they could flee the cities. The government began arranging evacuation of urban children in June 1944, and by September 1944, Shida county accepted 714 schoolchildren (the total of 792 including teachers and staff) mostly from Tokyo.109

Scholars have argued that the nation-wide phenomenon of evacuation [sokai] overturned the ressentiment against the cities among the rural population. Many urban residents suffered in the sudden displacement and formed bitter memories of their sokai experience.110 Katō Einojō experienced the shift in the urban-rural relationship personally. Two months before Japan’s surrender, Katō agreed to host twenty students of Tōhoku Imperial University in Sendai, as well as a professor of law, Nakagawa Zennosuke, in a community center attached to the Aratanome shrine.111 They put up a sign, “The Aratanome branch of the Law and Literature Department of

Tōhoku Imperial University.” Katō’s records do not say whether he felt any sense of superiority over the displaced urbanites, only about his belief in the increasing responsibility of rural villages. But under the extraordinary circumstances of wartime, Katō Einojō’s failed dream of

108 The shortage of food became a serious issue starting in 1939 because there was a huge drop in the import of Korean rice in 1939 and Taiwanese rice in 1940. Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin, 494. 109 Furukawa-shishi hensan iinkai, Furukawa shishi dai 9-kan shiryō IV, 172. 110 Kurokawa Midori, “Chiiki sokai haikyū — toshi to nōson saikō” in Iwanami kōza Ajia Taiheiyō sensō 6: Nichijō seikatsu no naka no sōryokusen, ed. Kurawsawa Aiko et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2006), 32-34. 111 Nishi Furukawa chiiki zukuri iinkai, Furusato sai-hakken Nishi Furukawa no meisho to kyūseki (Ōsaki: March 2008), 25.

#165 seeking higher education in a city seemed to be now all reversed as the refugees of the university sought help from him in his home village of Shida.

The Demise of the Rural Youth Industry

The social hierarchies in rural areas were being re-defined especially because the “pillars of youth” had left and never returned, leading to the demise of the Rural Youth Industry. Despite the alarm about population pressure in the 1930s, the agricultural population sharply declined in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In addition to the continuing governmental efforts to send farmers to Manchuria, conscription and war-related heavy industry absorbed rural youth during the final years of war. Nangō village, which eagerly promoted emigration to Manchuria, saw a rapid shrinkage of the tenant population to the extent that landlords suffered shortages in the workforce required to cultivate their land in 1941 and 1942.112 The diminishing numbers of agrarian youth is shown in simple demographic statistics. In 1930, the dominant demographic group in the agricultural sector was young men between 15 and 20 years of age. This was particularly true in Tōhoku, where these teenagers were presumably responsible for the

“overpopulation” to be eased through migration.113 In comparison, a 1948 study of Shida village pointed out that “the size of male population in their 20s and 30s dropped precipitously” and argued that “this speaks vividly of the demographic change during wartime.”114

The loss of manpower in Shida village mainly came from military service and death on battlefields. Between 1944 and 1945, the number of registered deaths almost doubled from 125

112 Sunaga, Kindai Nihon no jinushi to nōmin, 488. 113 Shakai-kyoku shomu-ka chōsa-gakari, Chōsa shiryō dai-20 gō: Tōhoku chihō nōson hihei jōkyō dai-3 pen (July 1930), 139, reprinted in Kyōkōka no Tōhoku nōson, ed. Kusunoki Masahiro (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1984), 503. 114 Nōrin chūō kinko kikakubu, Nōson jittai chōsa shiryō dai-2 shū: Miyagi-ken Shida-gun Shida-son (Unpublished: Nōrin chūō kinko kikakubu, 1948), 22.

#166 to 220 (causes unspecified).115 A village history of 1950 lists 240 soldiers who died in

Manchuria, Pacific islands, Okinawa, and other places between 1937-1946—approximately 8 % of all the male residents. Others presumably came home injured. The number conveys the gravity of wartime loss, especially when compared to the twenty soldiers who died during the sixty years of the Meiji and Taishō periods combined.116 Katō Einojō’s hamlet newsletters tell Aratanome’s struggle to deal with declining manpower as well as with the death of its young soldiers. It often reported news of Shida village’s group funerals held in the elementary school, requesting that hamlet residents raise a mourning flag.117 He also asked every remaining male resident between

21 and 50 years of age to attend the inauguration of the Patriotic Labor Corps in September

1943, organized to compensate for the loss of the workforce.118 In 1944, the village organized several “Military Assistance Emphasis Weeks.” Schoolteachers and village officials, including

Katō, visited the families of the conscripts to hear and record the details of their circumstances.

With very few young men remaining in rural villages, older men and women moved to the forefront of village management. The sōnendan (adult associations), consisting of those who had passed the conscription age of twenty, took over the role of seinendan and provided volunteer labor and leadership in agriculture.119 Katō Einojō, although he had earlier refused to

115 Shida sonshi hensan iinkai, Shida sonshi, 46 116 Ibid., 174-187. 117 Katō Einojō’s hamlet newslestter (kairanban), October 17, 1943, for example, archived in Katō-ke bunsho, Ōsaki City Hall. 118 Katō Einojō’s hamlet newslestter (kairanban), September 2, 1943, archived in Katō-ke bunsho, Ōsaki City Hall. 119 The national body of sōnendan, the Greater Japan Imperial Assistance Sōnendan, was led by Gotō Fumio, a main proponent of youth training in the government and a lifetime executive of seinendan. Other national seinendan leaders also got involved in establishing and managing the national network of sōnendan, such as Tazawa Yoshiharu and Yamazaki Nobuyoshi. Tazawa argued that “the permanent mission of the sōnendan movement was the follow-up of the seinendan.” Tazawa Yoshiharu, “Sōnendan no kōkyūteki igi to tōmen no ninmu,” Sōnendan 1 (January 1941): 4. (Ōno Rokuichirō bunsho, R204 (309)1803, in the National Diet Library of Japan)

#167 join the village seinendan, exercised his leadership through positions in the Shida village sōnendan and as a manager of Shida county sōnendan after May 1943. Young women played an increasingly larger role as a labor force. When women of 17 and 18 years of age formed a

“young ladies’ corps” [otome butai] to go to villages in Fukushima to boost their silk production in 1939, the newspaper featured a large photo of young women lining up at Furukawa station.120

Within a few years, female labor mobilization became the norm in Japan as elsewhere and

“reinforcement corps” [engun] for agricultural production became a synonym for young women’s labor units.121 Young women formed the teishintai (female volunteer corps) and took the place of the masculine seinendan in the final stage of the war.122 It is no coincidence that women wrote most of the memoirs that recounted the suffering of everyday lives on the home front—facing serious shortages of food and basic materials, working in fields and factories in abysmal conditions, teaching students war slogans, panicking in air raids, and finding burnt bodies of their children in the shelters.123

Conclusion

The Japanese countryside underwent an age of youth mobilization that stretched from the

Russo-Japanese War in 1905 to the peak of the Asia-Pacific War in the early 1940s. Owing to the head start in establishing youth training institutions, Japanese young men in rural villages began to find opportunities for upward mobility earlier than their colonial counterparts. In the 1930s,

120 “Idō rōryoku kappatsuka: Otome butai Fukushima e,” Kahoku shinpō, June 8, 1939, 8. 121 For example, “Kono kyōryoku, kono kansha: Ōsaki zendo ni tatakau kyūmai engun,” Kahoku shinpō, October 27, 1943, 4. 122 “Shigansha 3-bai toppa: Ōsaki chihō teishintai, otome no sekisei,” Kahoku shinpō, February 29, 1944, 4. 123 One example, written for children, is Shirahagi no kai, ed., Obāsan kara mago tachi e: Miyagi no sensō (Sendai: Miyagi Shirahagi no kai chūō shibu, 2005).

#168 seinendan members tied the battlefront and empire to everyday experiences in villages, uplifting social morale and production for the fighting empire—the empire relied on the “pillars of youth.”

The idealization of powerful rural youth continued in national policy and discourse until the end of the war. Yet, as farm youth left their home villages from the late 1930s, they emptied the Rural

Youth Industry of its protagonists. When young men were disappearing, the relationship of mutual co-optation—previously established between the state and farm youth—was extended to the entire population. As the state demanded the full participation and commitment of every citizen, it opened up an opportunity for underrepresented social groups to escape the confines of social hierarchies by utilizing the rhetoric of the state. At the same time, intensive mobilization disallowed the private arena—where people had formed desires for rural modernity and created incentives to subvert social hierarchies—to remain outside the purview of the state. In short, village youth had radicalized the ideology of nationalism by pursuing social opportunities, which in turn destroyed the mechanism of social mobility during wartime. !

#169 [The Hachiman Dōjō in Shida Village]

(Shida sonshi, photo page 20)

[Katō Einojō’s Record on Individuals’ Achievements in Donation Quota]

#170 ![Age and Sex Demographic Groups in the Agricultural Sector in 1930] Source: Shakai-kyoku shomu-ka chōsa-gakari, Chōsa shiryō dai-20 gō: Tōhoku chihō nōson hihei jōkyō dai-3 hen (July 1930), 140, graph 219, repr. in Kyōkōka no Tōhoku nōson II, ed. Kusunoki Masahiro (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1984), 504.

National

men women ) )

age

1000

500

1000 500

Tōhoku

(Units: in every 10,000 people 10,000 every in (Units: men women

age !

#171 ! ! ![Shida Village Age and Sex Demographic Groups in 1948] Source:! Nōrin chūō kinko kikaku-bu, Miyagi-ken Shida-gun Shida-son (unpublished, 1948), 24.

! ! ! ! !

#172 ! ! ! ! ! Chapter 5: Youth in a Mountain Village—Beipu in Xinzhu, Taiwan (1890s-1930s) !

Seeing the movement to establish and centralize the seinendan in Japan, Japanese colonial bureaucrats and educators felt impelled to introduce similar institutions as a means to nationalize—or assimilate—local population in Taiwan. The colonial setting, of course, made the task more difficult. In Taiwan, basic infrastructure to implement assimilation policies— elementary schools, moral suasion [kyōka] groups, and youth groups—spread rapidly even in remote villages in comparison with Korea. But this did not readily lead to the formation of what I call the “Rural Youth Industry,” a mechanism where youth turned mobilization into mobility, until the mid-1930s.

Taiwan’s unique social conditions explain this gap. Because Chinese migrants had arrived in Taiwan and colonized coastal towns and remote mountainous villages at different times over the centuries, when Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895, the colonizers faced a great variety of social dynamics made by class and racial relationships. The coastal provincial capital of Xinzhu province, Xinzhu city, resembled a town in mainland China long stratified by social classes. In these provincial cities, anti-colonial intellectual youth established local youth groups and tried to reach the rural population from there in the 1920s.

#173 In contrast, a newly conquered mountain village in the same province, Beipu, had not established a stable social order by the late nineteenth century. The village life revolved around the racial tensions between the Chinese Hakka and the indigenous Saisiyat. After 1895, Hakka leaders used the presence of the Japanese to secure their control over the mountains. In these villages, where mountains were the source of wealth and adventure, and youthful leadership was the norm in previous armed conquests, the idea of “rural youth” did not have a neglected and marginalized image vis-à-vis “urban youth.” This diversity in social conditions at the initial stage of colonial rule produced difficulties in implementing uniform programs across the island.

Despite these differences in social dynamics, the development of youth groups in Xinzhu province followed a broad pattern seen in Miyagi, Japan. The local youth groups first served local elites to solidify their status in the changing political and social environments. These elites monopolized the role of modernizers through youth groups. But the national movements to create the ideal “rural youth” eventually challenged their dominance. In Xinzhu, this was initiated in the early 1930s not by average agrarian youth themselves, but by Japanese educators.

New seinendan activities attracted a wide range of youth, but without creating job opportunities, their activities alone did not create a Rural Youth Industry for average youth in the countryside.

Nonetheless, rural youth mobilization up to the mid-1930s fostered hardwork-ism, frugality, and the identity as model rural youth—traits of ideal Japanese subjects. Once career opportunities became available to average farmers through wartime youth training, the spread of the seinendan and the high literacy rate allowed the rapid formation of a version of the Rural Youth Industry, which subsequently nurtured Japanese nationalism among youth in the Taiwanese countryside.

#174 Youth in Xinzhu City and Beipu at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

When Japanese colonial rule started, colonizers faced different social hierarchies in different parts of Taiwan. In Xinzhu city on the northwest coast of Taiwan, the main social dynamic was created by class divisions. The Chinese settlement in this area had started in the late seventeenth century. By the late nineteenth century, the wealth generated from trade, the mastery of Chinese classics, and the privilege of passing the Qing civil servant examination defined the upper class—in other words, their social status depended on the Qing source of prestige. After

Japan took over Taiwan in 1895, the Government-General of Taiwan (GGT) sought to find a way to replace the authority of Qing civil service and the Confucius education with new institutions.

Along with elementary schools, the early youth groups in Xinzhu city were one of the institutions that enhanced the upper-class status of the wealthy and the educated.

Japanese elementary and language schools were the first institutions built by the colonial government to provide a new source of status and privilege. Schools spread relatively quickly, and by 1904, the popularity of modern schools had almost reached that of shufang (private

Chinese schools run by local literati).1 However, schools did not immediately function as a status signifier. In 1903, a Japanese elementary school teacher in Xinzhu city, Hayashi Genzaburō, observed that the new school system had disrupted the previous avenues of social mobility in a way that Japanese officials did not expect. Elite families never discarded the idea that the

Chinese classics was the most authentic body of knowledge, so they sent their sons to shufang rather than the Japanese school.2 Only after the elite children grew up and realized the need of

1 Zhong Qinghan, Nihon shokuminchika ni okeru Taiwan kyōikushi (Tokyo: Taga shuppan, 1993), 120. 2 The reasons that Taiwanese avoided Japanese schools in early years were also listed in Taiwan sōtokufu minsei-bu gakumu-kyoku, Taiwan gakuji yōran (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1919), 3-8.

#175 Japanese language education did they enter the elementary school. As a consequence, students above 15 years of age constituted more than 44% of the total of 255 students in his school, and they were increasing in number every year. But because the supply of elementary schools was far smaller than the demand, Japanese introduced a stricter age limit for admission. Hayashi raised his concern about what would happen to the elite youth who were willing to study in school but were deprived of the opportunity. In his eyes, many had already lost discipline and hope, falling into a nihilistic and hedonistic lifestyle. Hayashi considered that “it is the fault of the Japanese that they strayed from the right path,” because previously when the Qing-style elite course was still in place for urban residents, they did not have any time for drinking, playing, or wasting money. Japanese destroyed the life cycle for middle- and upper-class elites without providing many alternative routes.3

Instead of elementary school diplomas, the phrase “youth circles” defined the new privileged class of the transitional period. The “youth circles” of Xinzhu began appearing in the government bilingual newspaper Taiwan nichinichi shinpō (P. Taiwan riri xinbao, E. Taiwan

Daily News) in 1906. The phrase referred to a new generation that acquired both Chinese- and

Japanese-style education unlike the majority of youth who went astray. They constituted a specific class, without an affiliation to a certain institution but with similar educational backgrounds and business (or academic) relationship with both Japan and China.4 But some of them did gather and organize youth groups in Xinzhu city. A number of “motivated youth” set up

3 Hayashi Genzaburō, “Jidō kyōiku to seinen kyōiku,” Taiwan kyōikukai zasshi (January 1903): 6-16. 4 For example, Xie Jieshi, a graduate of the earliest Japanese language school who came back from China and Tokyo, was exalted as a successful diplomat and “a special figure within Xinzhu’s youth circles.” Xie Jieshi becomes famous because he changed his Japanese nationality to the Republic of China in 1915, and became a Manchukuo’s ambassador to Japan in 1935. “Qing nian zhi jie,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, September 9, 1909, 5.;“Rui du jian shi,” (Hanwen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, January 22, 1910, 4.

#176 a youth group to “pursue learning and advocate civilization” in a temple in Xinzhu city in 1911.

They gathered every Sunday to “exchange knowledge,” particularly of Confucian scholarship, and to learn Japanese, Chinese, and mathematics.5

While “youth” symbolized the new class emerging under Japanese rule in Xinzhu city, in a small mountain village, Beipu, the Japanese presence impacted racial and ethnic relationships more than class divisions. Beipu is located only 10 miles southeast from Xinzhu city, but had developed community dynamics and social values separately from coastal areas.6 The dynamics in Beipu had revolved around racial tensions between Chinese Hakka residents and the Saisiyat aboriginal groups living in the neighboring mountains. The Hakka colonizers, the Jiang family, conquered the area for agricultural settlement only a half century before Japanese rule.7 Hakka migrants arrived in Taiwan much later than the Chinese Holo (or Minnan) people from the Fujian region, whose presence drove the newer Hakka migrants inland to form “belt-like residential areas at the foot of mountains, comprised of self-defensive hamlets, between the Fujianese Holo

5 “She qing nian hui,” (Hanwen) Taiwan riri xinbao, July 22, 1911, 3. 6 It is difficult to get an accurate size of population because the administrative units changed over time. In 1895, Beipu-dazi had 800 residents, reaching nearly 2,940 in the 1930s. Including the neighboring hamlets, it reached 9,320 by 1933. Fan Minghuan, ed., Beipu yin xiang shang (Xinzhu city: Beipu xiang gong suo, 2005), 253. Shinchiku-shū, Shōwa 8-nen Shinchiku-shū dai-13 tōkeisho (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1935), 33; Shinchiku- shū, Shōwa 13-nen Shinchiku-shū dai-18 tōkeisho (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū :1940), 13; Shimabukuro Kangi, Hoppo kyōdoshi (Beipu: Beipu kōgakkō, 1935), 66-67; The village first became famous for producing high-quality oolong tea, and still produces an award winning tea, The Oriental Beauty, today. In the 1930s, Japanese people considered Beipu as a picturesque site recommended for holiday visits. The Japanese named nearby Mt. Wuzhi (Mt. Five-Fingers) one of the twelve most scenic places in Taiwan, where “the magnificent view on the summit and the spiritual site with its many temples on the mountainside never ceases to attract visitors.” Chikutō gun’yakusho, ed., Chikutō gunsei yōran, (Zhudong, Xinzhu: Chikutō gun’yakusho, 1937), 22-24; Ōzeki Yoshio, “Chikutō yoitoko,” Shinchiku-shū jihō 1 (June 1937): 104. 7 Ethnic Hakka currently comprises one fifth (about three million) of the total population in Taiwan. Outside Taiwan, Hakka people spread in various areas throughout southern China, Southeast Asia, and Pacific islands. Owing to their history and scale of migration, people sometimes refer to them as “Jews in Asia,” with or without their liking. Though ethnic borderlines lack a pencil-drawn clarity, their own language, customs, and legends (all with variations), as well as a belief that they originated from the Central Plains in the Yellow River Basin still characterize Hakka as a distinctive ethnic group. See “Info Taiwan: People,” Government Information Office Republic of China (Taiwan), http://www.taiwan.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=105397&ctNode=1918&mp=999 accessed April 30, 2013.

#177 in the open land and the aborigines in the mountains.”8 Jiang Xiuluan and his armed men seized

Beipu and established the land-development company, Jinguangfu, in the 1830s.9 Jinguangfu operated like a small government independent of Qing China—deploying anti-aboriginal patrols, building irrigation systems, facilitating land cultivation, keeping track of tenancy, and collecting rents. During this process, many aboriginal men waged bloody battles against the Chinese colonizers, and were forced deeper into the mountains.10

Because of the racial tensions, Beipu leaders relatively quickly submitted to the Japanese colonizers in 1895. When Japan acquired Taiwan after the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Jiang

Shaozu, a 20-year-old great-grandson of the family founder, gathered hundreds of armed men to resist the Japanese army.11 But after his heroic death, Beipu villagers found the presence of

Japanese police force useful to maintain security against the Saisiyats. The number of Japanese settlers was small — even in the 1930s, the village only saw around 10 to12 Japanese households with 50 to 60 residents in total.12 Despite the small number of Japanese residents, the Jiang

8 Tai Kokuki [Dai Guofei], Tai Kokuki chosakusen 1: Hakka, Kakyō, Taiwan, Chūgoku (Tokyo: Miyagi shuppan, 2011), 110. 9 The Jiang family originally came from Huizhou of China, arrived in the Hongmao Port in 1737 before moving to Jiuxionglin forty years later. Wu Xueming, Jinguangfu ken ai yan jiu II (Xinzhu city: Xinzhu xian li wen hua zhong xin, 2000), 9-56. 10 For more details on the development of the township, refer to Wu Xueming, Jinguangfu ken ai yan jiu I & II. 11 See Zhong Zhaozheng, Jiang Shaozu zhuan (Taipei: Jin dai Zhongguo chu ban she, 1984) on his life. 12 Shinchiku-shū, Shōwa 8-nen Shinchiku-shū dai 13 tōkeisho (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1935), 33.

#178 family promptly incorporated Japanese-style administration and worked closely with the GGT.13

In 1896, they re-organized their patrol headquarters into colonial police stations, and invited the

Japanese to set up an administrative office in Beipu. In 1899, the Xinzhu police set up the civil- defense system [baojia] under the directive of Gotō Shinpei, the head of civil affairs in the

GGT.14 Local elites and colonial officials set up a Japanese language school in the village temple

Citiangong as early as May 1898, renamed as Hoppo kōgakkō (Beipu elementary school) five months later.15 To construct a new school building, the Jiang family and other local elites contributed a considerable amount of money.16

The racial and ethnic relationship and social hierarchy were closely linked in villages like

Beipu. The Japanese helped the Jiang family consolidate the wealth and status they had achieved through battles against aboriginal groups. In one way, racial and ethnic tensions increased complexity after the Japanese intervened. In 1907, Saisiyiat tribesmen and Chinese rebels attacked Beipu and killed 57 Japanese residents including schoolchildren (the “Beipu

13 All of the administrative functions that the Jiang and other families had developed not only remained intact during the early years of Japanese rule, but their power continued to grow by collaborating with the Japanese authorities. In 1899, the GGT gave a title of honor to the anti-Japanese hero Jiang Shaozu's cousin, Jiang Shaoyou, as a reconciliatory gesture. Jiang Zhengan, Jiang Shaozu’s nephew, not only expanded his family business and enhanced the family’s authority in Beipu, but also was soon appointed as an advisor to the Xinzhu Provincial Government in 1912 and retained the position well into the 1920s. Jiang Shaozu’s only child, Jiang Zhenxiang, also obtained many official titles in the colonial ruling system, including an advisory position to the GGT, developing close ties with both the Japanese rulers and other ruling-class Taiwanese. Wang Xingan, “Zhi min di tong zhi yu di fang jing ying: yi Xinzhu, Maioli di qu wei zhong xin, 1895-nian - 1935-nian” (MA thesis, National Taiwan University, 2000), 23. Ōzono ichizō, Taiwan jinbutsushi (Taipei: Tanizawa shoten, 1916), 140-141; Sugano Hideo, Shinchiku-shū enkakushi (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū enkakushi kankōkai, 1938), 30-121; Lin Jinfa, ed., Taiwan kanshin nenkan (Taipei: Minshū kōronsha, 1933), 40; Gomita Hiroshi, Shinchiku-shū no jōsei to jinbutsu (Xinzhu city: Suga Takeo, 1938), 257. 14 Baojia is a system in which the Qing government organized ten households as one unit, and ten units as one jia, and ten jia as one bao in order to enforce local security and order. Under Japanese colonial rule, Gotō Shinpei adopted it as “Taiwan’s tradition” to reinforce collective responsibility to maintain law and order. See Hui-yu Caoline Ts’ai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire Building: An institutional approach to colonial engineering (New York, Routledge, 2009), 93-118 on the colonial baojia system and sōteidan. 15 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 152-153. 16 Huang Rongluo, “Xun zhao lao Taiwan: yi wei wei da Ribenren jiao yu jia,” Taiwan shi bao, April 10, 1993.

#179 Incident”).17 The inter-ethnic mistrust heightened among the Saisiyiat, the Japanese, and the

Hakka after the police executed no less than hundred Hakka residents for their alleged involvement in the uprising. At the same time, the incident demonstrated the predominance of the Japanese armed power. The Japanese police quickly quelled uprisings and restored the order

—subduing the rebel forces in less than a day and re-establishing the aboriginal border patrols in four days.18 The Jiang family and Japanese village authorities used the anniversaries of the Beipu

Incident to emphasize the security offered by colonial village administration.

The Japanese intervened in the hierarchy and tensions between different Chinese descendent groups, too. Dai Guohui, a Taiwanese Hakka who grew up in Zhongli, Xinzhu province and became a historian in Japan later, argues that pre-Japanese rule Taiwanese society was characterized as a “frontier equivalent to the wild West” and “grudges and hostilities between [Holo and Hakka] people that had grown in the frontier history flowed at the bottom of

Taiwanese society” during colonial rule.19 The Japanese used a blanket label of “Han Chinese” that undistinguished Chinese groups, consequently allowing Hakka people to seek new opportunities in Holo-dominant communities.20

17 On the Beipu Incident, see Abe Shōsaku, Hoppo jiken no taiyō to kōgakkō no kankei (1907) in Chen Jiakang, Beipu qing huai (Beipu, Xinzhu: self-published, 2008), 95-123; Kimura Chiten, “Hoppo no bōdō,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, November 17 and 19, 1907; “Ōtsubo no sangai,” and “Hoppo jiken,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, November 19, 1907; “Hoppo bōdō no gen’in,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, December 20 and 21, 1907; “Hoppo jihen keisatsu no kōdō,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, December 24, 25, and 26, 1907; Shiba Yoshitarō, Taiwan no minzokusei to shidō kyōka (Taipei: Taiwan nichinichi shinpōsha, 1927), 198-201. For recent discussions, see Yang Jingting, Nei feng hao jie: Beipu shi jian mi wen (Xinzhu: self-published, 1982). Huang Rongluo, Beipu shi jian wen ji (Xinzhu city: Xinzhu-xian wen hua ju, 2006). Yang Jingting ed., Beipu shi jian yi bai zhou nian ji nian zhuan kan (Xinzhu city: Xinzhu-xian wen hua ju, 2008). 18 “Aiyūsen kaifuku” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō. November 19, 1907. 19 Tai, Tai Kokuki chosakusen, 108. 20 Ibid., 112.

#180 In villages like Beipu, where Japanese colonial rule did not destabilize the social class system but instead consolidated it, the term “youth” did not carry a new meaning. In these villages, because of the recent history of armed settlement, both the “rural” and “age” had different connotations from those in Miyagi, Korea, or even Xinzhu city. Young men had fought to found and protect the village, relying heavily on kinship ties. Because they had sought adventure and wealth in the mountains, there was no mass migration of village youth to the cities, and Beipu’s young leaders had already enjoyed power and status.21 The Japanese ideologues of “rural youth” at the turn of the twentieth century faced an unfamiliar dynamic in

Taiwan—they were unable to stimulate village youth to grow a grudge against urban youth and a desire for “risshin shusse” (“rising in the world”) by forming agrarian youth groups.

The difference in social dynamics—particularly the status of “youth”—between Xinzhu city and Beipu impacted the responses to the colonial attempt to establish youth groups. In 1915, when Japan issued the first decree to establish a national federation of the seinendan, the Xinzhu colonial Governor Mimura Sanpei planned to create a similar network in the province. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Japan’s rule over Taiwan, Mimura first established the

Xinzhu youth group [J. Shinchiku seinenkai, P. Xinzhu qingnianhui]. By expanding the network across the province, he aimed to “organize youth groups that include 3,000 elementary school

21 Many of the prominent leaders in Beipu during its development died quite young, leading to a high generational turnover. Jiang Xiuluan’s heir Jiang Ronghua died at the age of 46 (1877), his brother Jiang Rongfu died the following year at the age of 32, Jiang Ronghua’s son Jiang Shaoan had died at 18 before his father passed away, and Jiang Ronghua’s adopted successor Jiang Shaoji died when he was 28 (1889). The anti-Japanese hero Jiang Shaozu died at the age of 20 (1895). Jiang Shaoji’s close supporter Ceng Xuexi died when he was 43 (1890). Wu Xueming and Xiu Xianming, “Li shi diao cha yan jiu,” in Xinzhu-xian xian ding gu ji: Beipu Jiang Axin gu zhai xiu fu diao cha yan jiu, ed. Xue Qin (Xinzhu city: Xinzhu-xian wen hua ju, 2005), 1-2. Chen Zhihao, “Zhuqian nei zhan de di fang jia zu shi yan jiu: yi Beipu Ceng Xuexi jia zu wei li,” Xinzhu wen xian 35 (December 2008): 45.

#181 graduates, public servants, graduates of shufang, and 3,000 dropouts of elementary schools in order to improve youthful morals and to have them practice the Japanese language.”22

In Xinzhu city, this attempt appeared to achieve initial success before it faltered. The

Xinzhu youth group started providing night study sessions, mainly offering Japanese language education. Taiwan nichinichi shinpō described the popularity of the sessions: “since its establishment, the membership increased everyday… The first session had 40 people. The second session had 156, out of which 60 have absolutely no previous knowledge in Japanese.”23

After a few months, however, these groups ceased to function.24 In the 1910s, elite Taiwanese continued to view youth groups as a status-producing institution. Mimura’s attempt to establish an inclusive network, integrating thousands of dropouts of elementary schools, did not agree with the aspirations of “youth circles.” Elite youth in Xinzhu city still sought exclusive groups as late as September 1919, when they discussed a resumption of the Xinzhu youth group. They decided to begin anew with “the gentleman group” and another group that consisted only of middle school graduates and above.25 Given that Xinzhu province did not have even a single middle school until 1922, the members were a wealthy class, educated in Taipei or Japan.

In Beipu, Governor Mimura’s initiative failed for a different reason: the idea of youth groups did not attract local population even as a status symbol. The villagers did not oppose the advocacy of Mimura. They established the first Beipu youth group as one of the earliest in

Taiwanese rural villages. The celebration of Japanese rule accompanied another campaign—cut

22 “Ikanishite shiteikinenbi o shukusuruka,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, May 28, 1915, 7. 23 “Yexue kaihui,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, September 26, 1915, 6. 24 “Seinendan saikai,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, September 7, 1919, 4. 25 “Seinendan saikai,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, September 7, 1919, 4. “Seinenkai kaisan” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, October 15, 1919, 2.

#182 off the Qing-style queue of all students in the Beipu elementary school.26 Despite these efforts to facilitate the colonial campaign, the youth group only existed in name and disappeared quickly.27

Elite Youth Groups in the 1920s

In the 1920s, the Taiwan Cultural Association, the first island-wide organization that advocated self-determination of Taiwanese people, began organizing local youth groups in provincial cities. Youth in Xinzhu city received considerable influence from their activities, joining the battles between colonial and anti-colonial forces by switching their affiliation. Yet a closer look at the reports on them shows that status-marking remained the central function of these youth groups. In this period, the site of local youth mobilization began shifting from provincial cities to the rural countryside. Under “Cultural Rule” of the 1920s, colonial authorities spread new assimilation programs in remote villages. A new generation of local leaders, including the Jiang family in Beipu, assumed the role of “rural modernizers” by carrying out these programs.

In 1921, a Taiwanese elementary school teacher, Zhang Shigu, and four other men in

Xinzhu city, established a new youth group (again, named Xinzhu youth group).28 Initially,

Zhang’s group showed a strong pro-Japanese character, saying that it would “promote a community spirit, exchange knowledge, and study Japanese.”29 It gained official support from

Japanese school principals and local officials and continued to provide lectures on modern social

26 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 26. 27 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 55. Matsuo Shōji “Seinen shidō an” in Seinendan shidō ronbunshū, ed. Shinchiku-shū (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1932), 3. 28 Zhang Shigu’s background can be found in Lin Jinfa, Taiwan kanshin nenkan 1933, 199. 29 “Xinzhu kai qing nian hui,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao March 3, 1921, 6.

#183 life, such as “Tax Duties” and “Hygiene for Children.”30 In 1925, which the police authorities remembered as “the crazy time of public speeches by the Taiwan Cultural Association,” the

Xinzhu youth group scrapped its ties with the colonial authorities and joined a branch of the

Cultural Association.31 While reforming the youth group, they also started a “Xinzhu study group.”32 Taiwan minbao, a newspaper published by the Cultural Association, advertised study groups as progressive self-rule groups in comparison to the other youth groups associated with pro-colonial figures.33 Both the Xinzhu youth group and study group declared their support for the Cultural Association, leading to some arrests and even violence during their lecture events.34

In reality, regardless of their political affiliation, both the Xinzhu youth group and study group still functioned as elite youth clubs. The Xinzhu youth group did not change its activities

—reform of the old customs of funerals, for example, which was also a goal of the Japanese assimilation campaign.35 Taiwan minbao warned of the continuing ties between leaders of the

Xinzhu youth group and colonial authorities—“part of the leading members with ambitious minds actively visit the pro-colonial figures and help them criticize the youth group.”36 Once these youth achieved their goal of networking through the youth group, “they all turned

30 “Chikuseikai hakkaishiki,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, May 27, 1921, 3. “Xinzhu tongxin,” Taiwan kyōiku 230 (July 1921): Chinese pages 4-5. “Xinzhu tong xin,” Taiwan kyōiku 231 (August 1921): Chinese pages 2-3. 31 Taiwan sōtokufu keimu-kyoku, Taiwan sōtokufu keisatsu enkakushi dai 2-hen: ryōTai igo no chian jōkyō chūkan, Taiwan shakai undōshi (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1939), 151. “Xinzhu qing nian zhi huo yue,” Taiwan min bao, June 11, 1925, 5. “Qing nian hui de huo dong,” Taiwan min bao, January 9, 1927, 5. 32 C sheng, “Dui Xinzhu du shu hui de xi wang,” Taiwan min bao, February 27, 1927, 11. 33 “Qing nian hui yu du shu hui,” Taiwan min bao, December 12, 1926, 3. 34 “Xinzhu zai kai wen hua jiang yan,” Taiwan minbao, March 13, 1927, 6; “Xinzhu si fa jing guan de bao zhuang,” Taiwan min bao, May 15, 1927, 7, for example. 35 “Zu zhi sang yi gai liang hui,” Taiwan min bao, March 20, 1927, 8; “Zhu qing nian hui zu zhi zang yi gai liang hui,” (Ha nwen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, November 11, 1927, 4; “Xinzhu qing nian hui li hui,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, December 20, 1927, 4. Similar reports on March 5, June 20, July 22, 1928. 36 “Xinzhu duan xun (2),” Taiwan min bao, April 10, 1927, 7.

#184 inactive.”37 Taiwan minbao also reported that the Xinzhu study group turned into a party after meeting four or five times. “The organizer uses various excuses to turn a simple dinner into a drinking party in order to show his hospitality,” one member criticized, “this happened mostly without the members noticing, but it changed an occasion for academic studies into one for evaluating food.”38 Despite effort to restore these groups, they continued to suffer from the “lack of passion among the executive leaders” and “one or two conceited members,” and ended up being dissolved soon afterwards.39

To give another blow to the Cultural Association, a few dozens of the same members formed a brand new Shinchiku seinendan in 1929, this time with support of Japanese officials, school principals, and local elites. When the Shinchiku seinendan turned to the colonial authorities, it claimed that they were getting rid of old powers and making a “purely young” organization composed of those between 17 and 25 years old.40 Now “youthfulness” was being aligned with colonial authorities, after a short period during which the Cultural Association had emphasized youthfulness as a force against the colonial establishment.

To counter anti-colonial movements—particularly the movement to establish the

Taiwanese parliament starting in 1919, the GGT promoted “moral suasion” [kyōka] campaigns in the 1920s and 30s. The term kyōka had been widely used in Japan for ideological education to

37 Ibid. “Xue sheng da ken qin hui,” The characteristic as elite clubs was obvious especially because the Xinzhu youth group associated themselves mainly with graduates of middle schools or above, not with working youth in the city. Taiwan min bao, August 14, 1927, 6. 38 C sheng, “Dui Xinzhu du shu hui de xi wang,” Taiwan min bao, February 27, 1927, 11. 39 “Xinzhu: Qing nian hui zong hui,” Taiwan min bao, July 2, 1928, 6; “Xinzhu qing nian hui jie san,” Taiwan min bao, March 31, 1929, 2. 40 “Xinzhu zhi Qing nian tuan yu zhong lao zu fen li,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, March 8, 1929, 4; “Xinzhu qing nian hui jie san,” Taiwan min bao, March 31, 1929, 2; “Xinzhu: Du shu hui jie san,” Taiwan minbao, March 25, 1928, 6.

#185 spread Emperor-centered nationalism, the spirit of hard work, frugality, and modern living customs. In the Taiwanese context, kyōka campaigns meant assimilation programs with a similarly strong emphasis on the reform of daily customs. In the 1920s and 30s, all administrative levels had an institution that supervised kyōka programs; at the national level, the

Association of Social Work was established in 1920 and the Taiwan Kyōka Association in 1933;

Dōkōkai at Xinzhu provincial level, and Jinshinkai at Zhudong county and village levels established in 1929.

Beipu of the 1920s seems to have embraced the assimilation programs promoted by these colonial institutions. For the Jiang family, colonial programs allowed them to claim their role as local modernizers, influence villagers’ everyday lives, and monopolize government funding. In

1919, the Jiang family established an industrial credit union under the supervision of the village administrative office.41 They led various kyōka programs by forming a reform association,

Zhenduohui, in 1924.42 It introduced a money offering box in the central temple, Citiangong, for example, so that people would not “spend money wastefully” buying paper offerings to deities and spirits that were burned during prayers.43 A village branch of Jinshinkai also came to Beipu in 1929. In the village chronicle written in 1934, Jinshinkai provided a long list of “points of improvement of daily life.” Starting from suggestions on clothing (“do not buy new clothes or garments frequently”) and marriage (“use your own home or a religious facility for weddings and

41 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 82. 42 It also offered “youth library,” etc. Taiwan sōtokufu naimu-kyoku, Zentō seinenkai sonota shakai kyōka teki dantai (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1925), 7. 43 “Beipu Citiangong sai qian xiang,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, March 30, 1927, 4. The Xinzhu youth group also advocated to renew the customs surrounding religious festivals, trying to end the use of pillories and the burning of paper offerings as well. “Xinzhu Zhusheng juhui,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, May 31, 1925, 2

#186 avoid restaurants”), the 76 points covered customs regarding funerals, parties, celebrations, gifts, invitations of guests, meals, houses, public manners, and so on.44

These kyōka programs not only allowed the Jiang family to extend their dominance. They also created a new consciousness of “modern youth” among a new generation. Like Katō Einojō, the son of a landlord in Miyagi who grew up in a series of kyōka campaigns after the Russo-

Japanese War of 1904-5, the new generation emerged in the elite circle of Beipu. Jiang Ruichang, a symbol of the Japanese-rule generation—one of the first Taiwanese teachers in the Beipu elementary school who graduated from the elite teachers’ program—became the village head in

1920. The Beipu youth group, with 60 members, was newly founded on October 5, 1923 as a response to the initiative of Vice Governor-General Gotō Fumio. Their leaders symbolized the new generation that grew up under Japanese rule: Peng Qingqin, a young public translator, Liu

Muzai, a secretary to the Beipu village head, and Jiang Axin, a young business leader of the

Jiang family who graduated from Meiji University in Tokyo.45 The youth group worked closely with both the dominant Jiang and colonial authorities—they played “the industrial union song” at the ceremony to celebrate the completion of a new building of the Beipu credit union in 1930.46

The Beipu youth group operated as another kyōka institution under the supervision of

Jinshinkai, but their role was not limited to reforming old customs. By joining the colonial initiative of youth groups, the Beipu youth group connected the village to the larger world. They

44 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 62-66. 45 Taiwan sōtokufu naimu-kyoku. Zentō seinenkai 1925, 8; Taiwan sōtokufu bunkyō-kyoku, Zentō seinendan 1926, 10; Shinchiku-shū, Shinchiku-shū shakai kyōiku (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū 1931), 32. Lin Jinfa, Taiwan jinbutsu hyō (Taipei: Sekiyōsha, 1929), 118. Also based on interviews with Huang Yuanxing and his friends in Beipu on May 30 and August 18, 2011. 46 “Kaihō: rakuseishiki to shukugakai kyokō no Hoppo shinyō kumiai,” Taiwan no sangyō kumiai 44 (Feb 1930): 97-98.

#187 practiced sports and formed a musical band—activities popular as symbols of “modern youth” across the empire.47 The colonial bureau of education [bunkyō-kyoku] promoted interactions among youth groups across Taiwan. As a part of the effort, Xinzhu province organized large- scale joint sports festivals, gathering 4,000 schoolchildren, youth group members, and schoolteachers.48 News of other parts of the empire reached Beipu through the youth group. In

1927, the Beipu youth group raised donations for the victims of the earthquake in Kyoto by organizing a charity concert.49 Through these activities, youth group members symbolized the new force of the village and the empire.

In the 1920s, although activities and political orientations appeared different, the youth groups in both Xinzhu city and Beipu developed hand in hand with the discourse on the rise of youth. In both places, the positions of “modern youth” were monopolized by upper-class elites.

Although this was a continuation from elite “youth circles” in Xinzhu city, in Beipu, this meant the rise of a new generation that grew up not in the volatile racial and ethnic relationships, but in more solidified social class system. In the social conditions of the 1920s, generations began to form important identity boundaries even in Beipu.

Turn to Elementary School Graduates in the 1930s

As the youth groups spread in the course of the 1920s, Japanese educators started to apply the methods of the Japanese seinendan to Taiwanese youth groups, with a hope of achieving more success than Governor Mimura’s earlier attempt. Their involvement reflected the influential position they occupied in Taiwanese rural villages by the 1930s. As local residents,

47 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 55. 48 “Shinchiku-shū shusai no gakkō seinendan undōkai,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, November 5, 1925, 2. 49 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 55.

#188 they analyzed Taiwanese rural society with confidence, criticized colonial policies, and condemned local elites for leading hardworking village youth astray by importing urban culture.

The vocabulary they used in their essays and their assumptions about Taiwanese rural youth shows how eagerly they applied the Japanese experience of seinendan mobilization.

The year 1930 marked a new phase in the development of youth groups in Taiwan.

Colonial policies on youth education had developed incrementally during the 1920s. But the

1930 decree to standardize the names (into “seinendan”) and establish common rules, including stricter age limits, reflected the urgency of mass mobilization after the onset of the depression.

The Beipu youth group, now the Beipu seinendan, incorporated the new standard, adopting stricter age limits (15-25), reducing the number of its members to 40, and attaching itself to the local elementary school in 1931. They also had new rules, where the main purpose was to nurture them as “loyal members of the nation.”50 Like Xinzhu city’s Shinchiku seinendan, the previous Beipu youth group was first dissolved and then re-organized as a new group. They made a uniform probably at this stage, also imitating the Shinchiku seinendan, which sported new uniforms and a new flag at the inauguration ceremony.51

Despite the growth in the number of youth groups, this standardization led to a dramatic shrinkage in the total number of participants, shifting from around 50 groups with 7,000 to 9,000

50 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 55-56. 51 “Xinzhu qing nian tuan,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, May 18, 1929, 4. “Shinchiku seinendan ketsudanshiki,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, May 26, 1929, 5.

#189 members in 1925-6 to nearly 100 groups but with only 2,000 members in 1934.52 The overall number of participants declined by 42% between 1930 and 1931 alone.53 The scholar Miyazaki

Seiko argues that the shrinkage was intentional and aimed at suppressing anti-Japanese youth activities — or in the language of Japanese colonial authorities, activities of “bad youth.”54

Japanese educators in the countryside of Xinzhu province did not, however, regard cutting the size of youth groups as a means of social control. They felt a need for institutional reform because the youth groups in Taiwan had been so unsuccessful in developing into motivated, active associations for average farm youth. Miyajima Yutaka, an elementary school principal in Guanxi village, initiated his discussion “The Reality of Rural Youth Groups in This

Island” in 1932 by stating, “youth groups in local rural villages in Taiwan are extremely inactive.

Currently, most of them exist in name only, showing no activity or development, and are rather useless things.”55 Each youth group concluded too broad an area and too many people, and lacked community cohesion; the age range (15-35) was too large; they were not well funded; people expected the youth groups to produce results in projects, rather than encouraging “moral training” [shūyō].56 Other educators seemed to agree with Miyajima’s analysis of why village

52 “Shinchiku-shūka no seinendan ketsudan,” Taiwan nichinichi shimpō, October 12, 1934, 2; Taiwan sōtokufu naimu-kyoku, Zentō seinenkai 1925, 1. Taiwan sōtokufu bunkyō-kyoku, Zentō seinendan, shojokai, kachōkai, shufukai shirabe (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1926), 1; Taiwan sōtokufu, Taiwan shakai kyōiku gaiyō (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1929), 3. Taiwan sōtokufu bunkyō-kyoku, Taiwan shakai kyōiku gaiyō (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1932), 13. Shinchiku-shū naimu-bu kyōiku-ka, Shinchiku-shū kyōiku tōkei yōran (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1932), 94-100. Shinchiku-shū naimu-bu kyōiku-ka, Shinchikushū kyōiku tōkei yōran (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1933), 74-78. The overall number of youth group members peaked around 1926 (both male and female), and shrunk in the early 1930s, but this trend was more evident in Gaoxiong and Tainan Provinces. In Xinzhu, the increase was steadier although slower. 53 Miyazaki, Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan, 133. 54 Ibid., 135-136. 55 Miyajima Yutaka, “Hontō nōson seinendan shidō no jissai,” in Seinendan shidō ronbunshū, 119. 56 Ibid., 120-125.

#190 youth groups had not flourished. Another educator of Zhudong county, Matsuo Shōji, argued that the lack of a visible passion for anarchism, communism, and nihilism among Taiwanese youth was more difficult to handle. “The damage of the economic depression is not being felt [in

Taiwan] as severely as in Japan,” and, consequently, “we do not really see among Taiwanese youth group members those, like the ones in Japan, who pretend to be dangerous thinkers by talking big and who are infected by trendy ideas.”57 In official records, the unemployment rate remained low in the early 1930s, especially in a remote village like Beipu.58 But the living conditions of tenant farmers had become an issue, and Taiwan saw a rise in the number of tenant disputes in the late 1920s.59 Still, it was not “dangerous thoughts” like socialism that the colonial educators feared, but the individualistic tendencies of Taiwanese youth. Matsuo continued, “from now on (or already so), if we start to find in youth groups those who do not talk big, recruit others, or engage in demonstrations, but just quietly read and contemplate, then they would really be threatening as they are extremely difficult to deal with and beyond control of simple- minded youth group leaders. They would leave the youth groups before we knew it.”60

The Japanese teachers thought the problem lay in Taiwanese society, not in the goal of creating seinendan. Miyajima attributed the inactive nature of youth groups partially to the absence of similar kinds of groups in pre-Japanese-rule Taiwanese society, whose history as an

57 Matsuo Shōji, “Seinen shidōan” in Seinendan shidō ronbunshū, 8, 43. 58 The number of the unemployed is 1 in Beipu, 67 in Zhudong county, and 1,236 in Xinzhu province, 18,129 in Taiwan at large in the 1930 survey. Taiwan sōtoku kanbō rinji kokusei chōsabu, Showa 10-nen kokusei chōsa kekkahyō (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1932), 666-669. 59 Left-leaning authors, such as Yang Kui and Lai He (Loa Ho), started taking the theme of the exploitation of Taiwanese peasants in the 1930s. Colonial social activists often discussed the rural problem in the journal, Shakai jigyō no tomo around 1929. Also refer to Taiwan sōtokufu keisatsu enkakushi dai 2-hen: ryōTai igo no chian jōkyō chūkan, Taiwan shakai undōshi, 999 for the number of tenant disputes between 1924 and 1929. 60 Matsuo, “Seinen shidōan,” 43.

#191 immigrant society constitutes “sheer battles with hardship,” and made up of “defensive lives constrained within conquered territories.” They had no other means but to operate in “defense- oriented, independent, and extremely kinship-centric groups.”61 He continued by identifying two characteristics in their social relations as the largest obstacles. One was that the youth were

“under the strict control of their parents,” who did not understand the merit of youth groups.

Since the parents’ generation did not experience youth groups themselves, they were not at all cooperative. The other was that “the youth lack admiration for older leaders [outside their families]. It might be a result of their history in which they only sought wealth and power, but this is one of the reasons why the youth group leaders have difficulty in directing the members.”62 While puzzled by their observation that the youth lacked admiration for older figures, these teachers did not consider other explanations such as that youth perhaps already had stature in their villages. Neither did they seem to realize that the strong kinship-based ties already provided a social organization that was more solid than horizontal youth groups. They were too focused on the success of the seinendan network in Japan—no one really questioned why the villagers would want a youth group in the first place.63

These teachers thought they represented a higher ideal of empire than the colonial officials, whom they saw as too mired in compromises with powerful Taiwanese elites. They expressed their dissatisfaction with the sons of the landlord class, who were the primary

61 Miyajima, “Hontō nōson seinendan shidō no jissai,” 120. 62 Ibid., 121-123. 63 On discussion of how Beipu’s village society was organized before the Japanese colonial period, see Wu Xueming, “Riben zhi ming tong zhi xia Taiwan xiang cun she hui de bian qian,” Taibei wen xian 107 (March 1994): 23-67.

#192 members of the youth groups in the 1920s. Miyajima described the landlord youth as the source of almost every problem in village youth groups:

Most of the landlord youth who make a living by renting out farming land to tenant farmers never handle a shovel or a plow by themselves, but they proceed into higher school even after the middle school. Even those without academic ability or talent go to private schools, studying academic theories that have no practical application, and once they come back to the villages, they turn arrogant and do not understand agriculture, showing little sympathy for the hardship of tenants. They are often affected by urban culture, get used to luxurious life, despise rural villages, and do not enjoy associating with rural youth. Many second and third sons leave the village as salaried workers, and sometimes become village celebrities after improving their social status, but usually they are not helpful for the village as a whole. Instead, some harm the spirit of simplicity and 64 !fortitude by becoming objects of aspiration among village youth in deleterious ways… Miyajima’s frustration with the wealthy youth convinced him of the need to recruit a different type of village youth.

The ideal recruits for local youth groups, for Miyajima and other Japanese educators in

Xinzhu, were graduates of elementary schools who helped in family farming on their own or rented land. The middle school graduates “are arrogant and disdain their fathers’ occupations,” and “their brains alone grew, but they lack practical ability.” In contrast, elementary school graduates were generally loyal and trustworthy. They were “in the greatest need of guidance, yet most worth guiding.”65 Even if they could not afford going to elementary school, the youth who showed admirable character in Japanese language centers should be considered as model youth as well.66 They preferred those engaging in agriculture, not working as office clerks or in their

64 Miyajima, “Hontō nōson seinendan shidō no jissai,” 128. 65 Ibid., 126-127. 66 Ibid., 126.

#193 own business, saying that “agriculture is an occupation that Taiwanese people look down upon.

First of all, we need to inspire the pride of farmers.”67

Emphasizing the discontinuity in 1930 was important for these educators in order to give a fresh look to the youth group. Since they were still building the basis of local youth groups that had no historical roots, “selecting members requires tremendous attention,” Miyajima argued.

“First and foremost, we should only weigh the quality of the members, and not be concerned about the number… ten or so would be enough. Increasing the number is impractical and would not by accompanied by good results. By making it a group of high-quality youth, we need to make the label of youth groups valuable to youth and villagers.”68 Exclusivity was an important character of elite youth groups in the 1920s. The new goal was to transform the previously elite- centered youth group into a youth group that was still limited in membership, but not based on the social status, but on their commitment to a communal spirit and their qualities as good farmers.

These teachers had in mind the model of Japanese seinendan, which were quickly formed because they had a basis in pre-modern youth associations. In Taiwan, they could not create the façade of spontaneously formed youth groups and faced a challenge as colonial outsiders: How could the youth groups represent the villagers, not the colonizer, when all initiative came from

Japanese teachers? Hashinabe Kazuyoshi, another school principal in Xinzhu, was afraid that personal biases in the selection process would make the youth group appear to represent a particular interest group.69 These educators themselves had to be wary of the thin line between

67 Hashinabe Kazuyoshi, “Hontō ni okeru seinendan shidō no jissaian,” in Seinendan shidō ronbunshū, 97. 68 Miyajima, “Hontō nōson seinendan shidō no jissai,” 133. 69 Hashinabe, “Hontō ni okeru seinendan shidō no jissaian,” 62-63.

#194 their own favoritism and the definition of “model youth” villagers could appreciate. Here again, they considered that the absence of “dangerous youth” inspired by socialism made it more difficult than easy. In Japan and Korea, many youth group members drew legitimacy of their groups by positioning themselves against leftist youth. Without the visible presence of such politicized youth, the educators in the countryside of Xinzhu province felt a different kind of challenge in identifying local demands and creating an attractive picture of “model rural youth.”

Their decision to make elementary school education a key standard for member selection came out of their confidence in the extent to which Japanese schools transformed Taiwanese children. An increasing number of children went at least to elementary school in the course of the

1920s and 30s. The Beipu elementary school principal recorded that, in the central part of Beipu, the schooling rate in 1934 was 77% for male children and 35% for female children. Starting in the early 1920s, the school saw 50 to 70 students graduating every year, and by 1934, the Beipu elementary school produced 1,195 graduates (1,017 male and 178 female), of which 404 (all male) worked in agriculture upon graduating.70 A villager who attended the school between 1933 and 1939 noted, “almost every boy, regardless of whether they were poor peasants or wealthy landlords, could go to school.”71 It became a space where Beipu residents had the closest everyday interactions with Japanese people for the first and perhaps only time. Their personal connections turned into nostalgic memories later, and many of the graduates remained in contact with their Japanese teachers even after they had left Taiwan. The deep roots established by the

70 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 27-55. For the entire school district, the schooling rate was a lot lower: around 38-44% of male and 12-18% of female school-age children in the school district attended the school between 1930 and 1934. This is slightly lower than the averages for Zhudong county and Xinzhu province, most likely because the Beipu school district covered remote mountainous areas from which it was difficult for children to commute. 71 An interview with Huang Yuanxing in Beipu on May 9, 2011.

#195 elementary school in the local community gave the Japanese teachers the best opportunity to influence Taiwanese children.

In the school, Taiwanese pupils internalized a new social order, embracing the authority of the teachers and an age hierarchy among students, which the educators in Xinzhu thought was lacking in Taiwanese society. The most obvious achievement of elementary school graduates was

Japanese language ability. The spread of Japanese did not come naturally but had to be enforced through various means. Questions of the Japanese language pedagogy generated heated debates throughout the five decades of colonial rule. When elite youth groups started to form in the

1900s, colonial authorities expected them to promote Japanese language classes in the ways that village youth groups in Japan promoted “accent-free” standard Japanese pronunciation. But elementary schoolteachers were the only people equipped with the skill and willingness to provide Japanese language classes in and outside of the school.72

Various institutions for Japanese language education, and consequently other assimilation programs, revolved around the elementary schools and schoolteachers. The school became the most reliable institution for seinendan advocates, and the most familiar home of modern learning for the youth. The elementary school had already been associated with the earlier Beipu youth group. Its members marched in a musical band and distributed pamphlets to encourage children in the village to attend the school.73 The public learning center [kōmin kōshūjo] for graduates of the elementary school and the Japanese language center [kokugo kōshūjo] for school-age (mostly

72 In 1901, one of the very first night classes in Xinzhu city provided Japanese language education to uneducated workers, made possible only in cooperation with schoolteachers. “Shinchiku no yagakkō,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, May 23, 1901, 1. The teachers were core members of the Xinzhu youth group who provided Japanese classes at night schools in the early 1920s. Naturally, these night classes took place in the facilities of elementary schools. Dai Tianfei, “Shinchiku tsūshin,” Taiwan kyōiku 231 (August 1921): 2. 73 “Beipu qing nian tuan huo dong,” (Han wen) Taiwan ri ri xin bao, March 30, 1929, 6.

#196 female) children and youth who did not enroll in the school were set up in the Beipu elementary school in 1931 and 1933 respectively.74 The centrality of the elementary school in the wide range of educational programs made both Japanese and Taiwanese teachers extremely busy and even

“exploited,” as village heads observed.75 “Everywhere I go, I witness with my own eyes that teachers’ lives today had no time to spare, and personally I cannot help but truly sympathize with them,” observed an education official who visited a number of vibrant village youth groups and language centers in Xinzhu countryside.76

Creating Model Rural Youth in the 1930s

The Xinzhu educators faced the strictest limit in changing the content of seinendan activities. They thought that youth needed to engage more in shūyō (moral training, self- cultivation)—lectures, reading, and character building activities. In their mind, it was only through shūyō that rural youth would learn agrarian nationalism and become the “pillars” of increasingly important kyōka campaigns. Behind the term shūyō was their effort to detach kyōka programs from dominant landlord leaders and increase the status of average farm youth.

Shūyō was surely not at the top of the agenda for village youth groups that operated under landlords’ supervision. Matsuo considered that they engaged in too many volunteer public projects instead.77 This was partly the fault of the colonial government—because of the absence of a centralized seinendan network and a military conscription exam, the GGT had assessed the

74 Shimabukuro, Hoppo kyōdoshi, 58-60. 75 “Shinchiku-shū kyōka taisaku zadankai jōkyō,” Taiwan kyōiku 381 (April 1934): 134. 76 Shibayama Takenori, “Sōshun no inaka o aruku, Shinchiku-shū no gakuen o meguru,” Kunpū 34 (March 1935): 16-17. 77 Matsuo, “Seinen shidōan,” 48-49.

#197 group achievement based on the numbers of events, gatherings, and participants.78 Matsuo pointed out, “it was a bad idea that the government authorities only considered the results of gathering events in awarding the best youth groups.”79 When the Shinchiku seinendan was designated a model group in 1932, the committee praised its wide array of activities:

The first day of every month, they have the day of public interests and an early morning study gathering. Every Saturday they have a military drill supervised by an assigned officer… They held various events celebrating the Emperor’s visit, a cinema showing for citizens, a harmonica band, a singing and dancing party, and a table tennis tournament in April. They opened a new youth building and created a group song in May, had a record concert and a debate roundtable in June, a music festival and early- 80 !rising events in July, a mobile camping and a baseball team in August. From Matsuo’s point of view, these events did not necessarily mean successful training of the youth. “It is ‘home guidance’ [katei shidō] that should be the criteria for success of the youth groups” because the goal of shūyō is to influence their everyday lives.81

The shift towards shūyō became an important agenda item because the home country was embarked on a major kyōka (moral suasion) campaign in the 1930s. The colonial educators criticized that dominant landlords monopolized kyōka assimilation programs, as the Jiang family did in Beipu. Envisioning that elementary school graduates promote kyōka through youth group activities, they advocated “sociable interactions, leisure, and learning” as three core elements necessary in their training.82 Among the training methods they promoted, night camping and mountain climbing were widely implemented. Beipu’s southern wall, Mt. Wuzhi, was a popular

78 For example, Shinchiku-shū, Shinchiku-shū kyōiku tōkei yōran (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1932), 95-100. 79 Matsuo, “Seinen shidōan,” 5. 80 “Yūryō seinendan no hyōshō,” Taiwan kyōiku 356 (March 1932): 113-114. 81 Matsuo, “Seinen shidōan,” 6. 82 Matsuo, “Seinen shidōan,” 10-12.

#198 destination of mountain excursions for Xinzhu youth. Even a mountain climbing trip was full of opportunities for learning: Switching the youth’s positions frequently according to their strengths so that the team would reach the destination as a coherent group without spreading out, learning to appreciate the beauty and mystery of nature, and not leaving even a bit of newspaper after lunch—as the teachers described it, “climbing in this way would bring about not merely physical exercise, but high-quality moral training.”83

In the transitional period from landlord-led elite groups to those of model farmers, the seinendan were widely advertised as a modernizing force by both elites and schoolteachers. The seinendan provided spectacles and increased their presence in the early 1930s. It became news when 45 members of the Shinchiku seinendan, for example, went on a cycling tour of the northern Taiwan from Xinzhu to Taipei, showing off their mastery of bicycle riding in the name of strengthening their bodies.84 On another occasion, the Xinzhu police deployed a band comprised of seinendan members in front of its automobile parade, distributing 20,000 brochures to promote traffic rules.85 Seinendan members from various regions demonstrated their mastery of Japanese on the radio show, Kokugo fukyū no yūbe (Evening of the Promotion of National

Language, 1930-1933), twice a week. They presented a dozen different performances, including

83 Ibid., 46-47. 84 “Shinchiku seinendan no jitensha tōnorikai,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, January 29, 1931, 5. “Shinchiku seinendanin hokubu jitensha ryokō,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, January 30, 1931, 2. 85 “Shinchiku-shū no kōtsū seiri,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, October 2, 1931, 3.

#199 Japanese folk songs, marching songs with a Manchurian theme, conversational skits, and essays composed by the youth.86

As a tool of kyōka assimilation campaign, the educators promoted “youth amateur plays.”87 In them, the youth literally played model rural youth—-they were “artists of soil” in creating vegetables and rice. They helped their younger family members to complete elementary school education even in dire poverty. They encouraged their parents to abandon superstitious beliefs and trust modern medicine. These plays almost always included a subplot of young people opposed to arranged marriages, which traditionally involved a large amount of money handed from the bridegroom to the parents of the bride.88 By performing these plays, the seinendan not only spread kyōka messages as a modernizing force, but also challenged traditional elitist norms in which acting on the stage was frowned upon.89

Japanese educators attempted to create a communicational space among Taiwanese rural youth to foster an identity as “moral rural youth.” The new magazine, Kunpū (Summerly Breeze:

1932-), presented colonizer’s messages in essays written by Taiwanese rural youth. This created

86 For example, see “Chūnanbu chihō o fukumu rajio hōsō kokugo fukyū no yūbe,” Taiwan kyōiku 363 (October 1932): 92-93; “Chūnanbu chihō o fukumu rajio hōsō kokugo fukyū no yūbe,” Taiwan kyōiku 368 (February 1933): 97-98. On Xinzhu youth’s performance in the show, see Yazawa Hideo, “Sangatsu jūsannichi kokugo fukyū rajio hōsō ni shutsuen sareta Shinchiku-shi no minasama ni: Nihonjin nara Nihongo de hanase,” Taiwan kyōiku 357 (April 1932): 133-135. 87 Some youth groups affiliated with the Cultural Association already adopted amateur plays to attract wide audience in the 1920s. They proved the effectiveness of entertaining youth plays already, not only to reach village audience, but also to influence the youth who practiced and performed them. Xinzhu’s 新光劇団 performed enlightenment-theme plays almost professionally, for example. See Taiwan sōtokufu keimu-kyoku, ed., Taiwan shakai undōshi, 158, 223. There are a number of anecdotes about the popularity of amateur youth plays recorded by researchers. One of them is Chen Wen Sung (Winston), “Taiwan Sōtokufu no ‘seinen’ kyōka seisaku to chiiki shakai no hen’yō,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Tokyo, 2008), 230. 88 Appendix, Kunpū 30 (November 1934). The Zhongli rural youth group from Xinzhu province presented their own play at the All-Taiwan Japanese Language Competition (全島国語演習會), similarly advertising to abolish the custom of arranged marriage. Chūreki seinendan, “Seinengeki: Taue uta” Kunpū 32 (January 1935): 24-27. 89 Taiwanese elite three decades before refused to send their children to the elementary school because they practiced singing songs. Taiwan sōtokufu minsei-bu gakumu-bu, Taiwan gakuji nenpō 1919, 4.

#200 a semblance of the seinendan newsletters that Japanese youth circulated by themselves. Many of the essays in Kunpū stimulated the youthful desire to “rise in the world” and argued that success was possible for rural residents without higher education. One youth group member, Cai Qingzi, asserted that youth should start saving money as soon as possible, saying “saving is difficult at the beginning, but the first [principle] of youth is patience. Those who work very hard with no distraction would always bloom one day.”90 These publications were made available to rural youth, many of whom were literate through school education by the 1930s.

The Xinzhu seinendan raised its profile most powerfully in the context of a natural disaster in the same way that the Japanese seinendan did in rural famines. On April 21, 1935,

Xinzhu and Taizhong were hit by large-scale earthquakes, which killed more than 3,200 people and destroyed more than 38,500 houses and buildings.91 623 members from 40 seinendan in

Xinzhu province rushed to the severely affected villages in Zhunang and Miaoli counties to rescue survivors, dig up bodies, clear rubble, and set up emergency shelters. They provided food, distributed medicine, and secured lifelines by helping to re-build roads and bridges with police forces.92 Newspapers and Kunpū emphasized the sacrifices of these youth who committed themselves to the public rescue mission despite the damage suffered by their own families. These youth were also good boosters of the kyōka campaign more broadly. One youth play published in

Kunpū a year later was staged in a post-earthquake rural village in Xinzhu. The protagonist was a

90 Cai Qingzi, “Kinken no seinen,” Kunpū 30 (November 1934): 18-19. 91 “Daishinsai nyūsu,” Kunpū 36 (May 1935): 37. 92 The damage in Beipu was not as devastating, but 25 members of the Beipu seinendan immediately gathered to collect information and maintain the village’s social order. “Shushōnari seinendan,” Kunpū 36 (May 1935): 4-34. The youth in Xinzhu and Taipei provinces engaged in prolonged volunteer work, accompanying the injured and delivering food and goods to the victims. “Shinpo seinendan no jihatsuteki hōshi,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, April 27, 1935, 3. “Daitōtei seinendan kara kyūgohan ga shutsudō,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, April 28, 1935, 2.

#201 young man who engaged in the rescue mission. In the play, he remained humble about his sacrifice, and donated the entire award money given him by the Xinzhu Governor to earthquake victims. A typical kyōka touch was added in the end when he decided to marry a girl of the same family name, rebelling against the customary taboo of marrying within a clan of the same origins.93 In this way, in Tōhoku and Xinzhu alike, natural disasters raised the value of masculine power of rural youth.

Did the rise of “rural youth” and establishment of the seinendan for elementary school graduates create social mobility for average young farmers in Taiwan? The seinendan alone did not systematically produce job opportunities in the way youth training centers did in the countryside of Miyagi. Yet, according to anthropologist Miyazaki Seiko, the seinendan in not-so- remote provincial towns began providing social mobility to non-elite youth in the early 1930s. In the transition from elite-led youth groups to the seinendan of “model rural youth,” the youth between these classes found a window of opportunities. In the town of Xinzhuang in Taipei province, where Miyazaki conducted oral historical research, the seinendan was membered by elementary school graduates, but they generally came from relatively well-off families and few engaged in agriculture. Through group gatherings, they established connections with local notables and officials. The affiliation with the seinendan allowed them to obtain job opportunities in administrative offices that were usually occupied by middle school graduates.94

Although limited in scale, the seinendan in Taiwan began to produce a mechanism of social mobility for less privileged youth in less urban areas by the mid-1930s.

93 Nakayama Yū, “Hohoemu aozora,” Kunpū 47 (March 1936): 1-13. 94 Miyazaki, Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan, 173-180.

#202 Conclusion

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of “youth”—a pronoun of a new privileged class educated in Japanese and Chinese in Xinzhu city—did not resonate in the remote mountain village of Beipu. Nor did the image of “rural youth” developing in Japan attract elite youth or farm youth in Beipu. The difference in the connotation of “youth” and “rural youth” did not come from the absence of colonial officials’ effort to mobilize rural youth—it was despite

Governor Mimura’s initiative in 1915. It derived from the social dynamics of new villages in

Taiwan, where both “rural” and “youth” were highly valued in the recent past of armed conquests against aboriginal groups. Beipu’s example shows how rural youth mobilization did not automatically succeed by spreading agrarian ideologies and establishing youth groups. More important for seinendan advocates was to grasp local social hierarchies that conditioned desires and aspirations of rural population. In the early 1930s, Japanese educators in Xinzhu, although with a lens tainted by the model of the Japanese seinendan, analyzed dynamics of Taiwanese rural society. They believed that in Taiwan, too, elementary school graduates had a potential to become “pillars of youth” of the Japanese empire.

Without a systematic way of creating job opportunities for average agrarian youth, the

Taiwanese seinendan in the early 1930s were yet to form a Rural Youth Industry—the mechanism that produced a highly nationalistic population in Japan. But a few elements that grew during this period made it possible for a version of the Rural Youth Industry to emerge soon: the commitment of Japanese teachers, the high rate of literacy among Taiwanese children, the improving reputation of the seinendan, and the sphere of communication in the seinendan

#203 journal, Kunpū. Based on these elements, colonial advocates of the seinendan could promote agrarianist values and the identity of “model rural youth” among elementary school graduates. ! ! ! ![The Inauguration Ceremony of the Xinzhu Youth Group] Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, May 31, 1929, 5. ! ! ! ! !

#204 ! ! ! ! ! Chapter 6: Taiwanese Youth in the Nationalizing Empire (1937-1945) !

At the beginning of colonial rule, the Japanese faced a number of distinctive social conditions in Taiwan. Mountain villages like Beipu, in particular, were characterized by recent settlement of Hakka migrants. The armed conquests defined wealth and social status, rendering the image of “rural youth” dissimilar to that in Japan or Korea. Yet, once the colonial state solidified the dominance of local landlords, rural villages lost social mobility like other parts of the empire. In the late 1930s, when the Government-General of Taiwan (GGT) and its local offices launched youth training institutions for wartime mobilization, village youth aligned themselves with mobilization as a way out of the marginalized status. The overlap of the ambitions of Taiwanese youth and the needs of the wartime empire created a Taiwanese version of the Rural Youth Industry, where youth turned mobilization into opportunities and, through that process, internalized the ideology of Japanese nationalism.

One feature of youth mobilization in Taiwan is how rapidly it was carried out once it started in earnest. Until the mid-1930s, local youth groups were still associated with elite youth despite the Japanese teachers’ struggle to transform them into the Japanese-style seinendan of model farmers. After 1937, however, the groups quickly became a rural bastion of Japanese nationalism. The stories of two figures, Huang Yuanxing and Xu Chongfa, show the various

#205 social factors that came together to make this happen—personal bonds in youth training institutions, pragmatic benefits of new job opportunities, and the heated rivalry among rural youth of different provinces and between rural youth and urban students, for example. Although many scholars focus on the emotional process of replacing a Taiwanese identity with a Japanese identity, the identity shift was more context-specific, sometimes serving as an instrument in other kinds of struggle in the lives of agrarian youth. Their sense of rivalry and desire to overcome peripheral positions in the family, in the village, in the province, in Taiwan, and in the empire became the driving force behind the intensive Japanization of Taiwanese population.

The War and the Local Youth Groups

Although kyōka (moral suasion) had already been a central theme, there was little wartime urgency evoked in the training of village youth groups [seinendan] in Taiwan in the early 1930s. Even in the government-supported youth magazine Kunpū, there was more discussion on how to overcome traditional taboos surrounding marriage than about Japan’s “time of emergency” after the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. But the Sino-Japanese War, starting on

July 7, 1937, triggered Taiwan to prepare for war. A flood of news reports on the fighting in

China and the homefront efforts in Japan had a major impact on the mood of youth training. The demand for elementary school education among Taiwanese population increased rapidly, pushing the attendance rate of school-aged children in Xinzhu city from 65% in 1938 and 73% in 1940, to 95% in 1942.1 Youth, and rural youth in particular, were considered the engine of Taiwan's

Japanization efforts. The ultimate goal of the accelerated assimilation campaign was now set to produce reliable soldiers—soldiers with guns, plows, and Japanese language skills.

1 Xu Peixian, “Riben tong zhi mo qi Xinzhu shi nei de jiao yu zhuang kuang,” Zhuqian wen xian 43 (July 2009): 43.

#206 With the outbreak of war, the Taiwanese seinendan immediately supported Japan’s cause in the war. In Xinzhu province, 350 leaders of youth groups and the Governor gathered in the city on September 17, 1937, to pray for the victory of the Japanese military at the Shinchiku

Shrine, holding a convention to discuss the prospect of its activities to support the war efforts.2

They concluded that the seinendan needed new strategies of recruitment. It had only been targeting those who graduated from the elementary school, did not continue schooling, and were willing to join. The Xinzhu educators in the early 1930s presented a good reason to narrow the scope of participation to build an organization with highly motivated youth. But now with the war effort, the seinendan had to transform themselves into institutions that would organize a much larger number of people and train local leadership to Japanize the whole society.

When the GGT compelled all male youth and all unmarried female youth to join the seinendan, its membership exploded. Scholar Miyazaki Seiko explains that the GGT had originally planned to establish the mandatory seinen gakkō (youth school) system at the same time as Japan did in 1939, but this could not be implemented because Taiwan had not yet fully realized a system of mandatory elementary school participation. In order to make up for of the absence of youth schools, the GGT enforced the universal participation in village youth groups instead. Between 1938 and 1939, the number of youth group members in Taiwan jumped from

62,906 to 269,906.3 The Xinzhu seinendan preceded this island-wide trend. Within a few months

2 “Seinendan shūka kara 350 mei wo atsume kyūichikō kōdō de,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, September 8, 1937. “Rengō seinendanin ga kenshō wo kigan Shinchiku jinja ni sanpai,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō. September 18, 1937. 3 Miyazaki Seiko, Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan to chiiki no hen’yō (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 2008), 257-263. See the graph on Miyazaki, 88 as well. The seinen gakkō increased in number in 1943 and there was a plan to make it mandatory. It provided pre-military training for elementary school graduates. See Miyazaki, 311-353. The one in Xinzhu city was established in 1939. My interviewees do not remember if there was a seinen gakkō in Beipu.

#207 after the beginning of the war, Xinzhu officials already promoted universal participation.4 The most dramatic jump occurred between 1936 and 1937—from 4,851 in 1936 to 14,554 in 1937, and to 27,638 in 1938.5 Xinzhu Governors started using the phrase “thirty thousand youths in the province” (shūka sanman-nin no seinen) as an icon of the strong Japanization movement in the province.6

The new homefront mobilization facilitated the centralization of the seinendan. In June

1938, for the first time in Taiwan, seinendan institutions created a central body, the Taiwan

Seinendan Federation, to oversee island-wide activities. In its inauguration, youth declared four resolutions: “We will complete the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement. We will volunteer for patriotic labor [kinrō hōkoku]. We will establish Japanese-speaking villages and towns. We will perfect national defense.”7 A month before this, to emphasize the role of millions of youth as an engine for the war effort, Governor-General Kobayashi Seizō had already distributed a message in the form of a gramophone record, calling on “all young people in this island, you have to know the social status that you have, take charge of things passionately and pure- heartedly, and be ready, with positive state of mind, to become the salt of the earth.”8

Local levels underwent a streamlining of various semi-governmental groups. The Xinzhu provincial government issued an act to re-organize the seinendan on the third anniversary of the beginning of the war in 1940. The communication line from the provincial government to

4 “Danjo seinen wo zenbu seinendan ni: Shinchiku-shū no seishin sōdōin undō,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, October 19, 1937. 5 The numbers are from Shinchiku-shū kyōiku-ka, Shinchiku-shū kyōiku tōkei yōran (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1936-1939). 6 “Seinen shūrenjō ni okeru Akahori chiji kunji,”Dōkō 181 (October 5, 1938): 3. 7 “Sensei,” Kunpū (August 1938): 7. 8 Kobayashi Seizō, “Seinen ni tsugu,” Kunpū (May 1938): 7.

#208 individual youth was designed to match the line of command of kyōka associations, including the moral suasion federations [kyōka rengōkai] and hamlet revitalization groups [buraku shinkōkai].

The Xinzhu government expected that the seinendan would be part of the Patriotic Imperial

Subjects [kōmin hōkō] campaign. At the village level, it separated young people into two groups; one for those who graduated from the elementary school, and the other for those who did not.9

The latter had to have two to four years of language education first before joining the seinendan.

The members gathered regularly in small groups to conduct a set round of training and volunteer work. They wore the standardized uniform of the newly centralized seinendan.10

Together with this institutional centralization, the government placed a strong emphasis on localities, coinciding with the dual development of localization and centralization of youth training in Japan itself.11 Both the GGT and the Xinzhu provincial government demanded that local leaders design concrete plans of volunteer work and Japanization training courses that would meet the local conditions. Newspapers and journals applauded local activities, including

Shinkensetsu (New Construction), the journal of the Patriotic Imperial Subjects Associations

(PISA: kōmin hōkōkai), often publicized “unique activities” in various villages and towns.

Reflecting the three years of the Patriotic Imperial Subjects Campaign, the PISA headquarters and a group of journalists criticized the spiritual arguments of the campaign: “overall the guiding principles are too abstract. Should we not suggest more concrete things in accordance with each

9 According to the official statistics, the average of 48.47% of the school-aged children went to school (63.84% of male and 33.10% of female children) in 1938. Shinchiku-shū, Shōwa 13-nen Shinchiku-shū dai-18 tōkeisho (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1940), 35. 10 Tanaka Ichiro, “Honshū seinendan kyōka saru,” Shinchiku-shū jihō 39 (August 1940): 32-35. 11 See Hui-yu Caroline Ts'ai, Taiwan in Japan's Empire Building: an institutional approach to colonial engineering (New York: Routledge, 2009), 145-166 for a discussion on creating “the local” which became the center of colonial rule and developed into wartime mobilization.

#209 locality?” As in Japan, the importance of locality was underlined through the national network of

PISA.

The emphasis on locality exacerbated the old dilemma about leadership. If local officials initiated the campaign on their own authority, youth would participate but not be interested in the prescribed standard activities. It was more desirable for non-official local figures to take charge.

The problem was that local leaders of the PISA programs were mostly “rich intellectuals who enjoy debating ideologies” and “lack passion in practice.”12 The discussion, as always, led to the determination to promote the training of village youth who with first-hand knowledge of their villages. “Regarding youth training, we should teach how they should lead and improve their particular villages in a more concrete way, and show them individual cases, including how other villages use which methods and what they achieved... The future of our campaign relies in great part on the power of practice of these youth. Youth desire excitement and inspiration. We should direct responsible work to them.”13

The Xinzhu Youth Training Center [The Xinzhu Seinen Shūrenjō]

The dilemma of leadership was nothing new.14 It had been a constant headache for

Xinzhu educators, who believed that “an impassioned speech on loyalty and love for the nation has to come from the leaders of the same ethnicity,” but local leaders “do not have sufficient

12 “Hōkō undō genchi hōkoku: genni imashimubeshi hōkō undō no chūchōka,” Shinkensetsu (July, 1943): 28. 13 Ibid., 29. 14 “Taihoku-shū ga shirin ni nōgyō shūrenjo wo secchi shūka no wakaki mohan nōson seinen wo senbatsu nōson shidōsha wo yōsei no hōshin,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, November 25, 1931; “Zentō teki ni hokoru ni taru Taihoku-shū nōgyō shūrenjo nōgyō keiei nohan wo ippan ni shiji subete kyūhi ikkanen de sotsugyō,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, December 7, 1931.

#210 Japanese ability or quality to give citizenship training.”15 The colonial officials held the first

“pillars of youth” training camp in Taipei for one week in February 1935, gathering 60 people from all over Taiwan who had finished elementary school, had been active as youth group members for more than two years, were male, healthy, strong, and younger than 25 years old.16

Xinzhu’s first attempt to provide thorough leadership training was an agricultural training center that began in July 1935. The provincial government established the facility with 80 acres of land near the beach in Qiding and invited agricultural specialists to teach thirty young farmers.17

Thirty young people a year—this was hardly a desirable scale for leadership training, especially after 1937. In August 1938, the Xinzhu officials launched a new youth training center

[seinen shūrenjō; thereafter “shūrenjō” ] near the beach of Nanliao.18 They selected 60 young people from village seinendan groups in the province for thirty-day training.19 They scheduled one-month cycles almost back to back, to reach the maximum number of young people. “Even the Adolf Hitler School is eight years of education, but Xinzhu province's youth training center is going to complete it within 30 days,” they bragged, emphasizing the intensity and effectiveness of the training before it even began.20

15 Hashinabe Kazuyoshi, “Hontō ni okeru seinendan shidō no jissaian,” and Matsuo Shōji, “Seinen shidōan,” in Seinendan shidō ronbunshū, ed. Shinchiku-shū (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, April 1932), 23, 65. 16 “Dai ikkai zentō nōson chūken seinen shidō kōshūkai,” Kunpū 33 (February 1935): 33-35. 17 “Tokushoku aru seinen dōjō Shinchiku shūritsu nōgyō denshūjo: suki to kama de jicchi tanren shite mohan nōson seinen wo zōsei,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō. July 20, 1935. 18 Kishiwa Tadashi, “Joshi shidōsha renseikai,” (unpublished report, May 1943, provided by Xu Chongfa) briefly describes the difficulty that Xinzhu officials had in getting a permit from the GGT. The participating youth constructed a new shūrenjō building in Matsugane in the backyard of the Shinchiku Shrine in late 1943. 19 The very first-term trained 20 young men for 30 days. Women's training for the first few years was 20 days. 20 “Iyoiyo kaishi wo kettei shita Shinchiku shūritsu seinen shūrenjō,” Shinchiku shinpō, August 1, 1938.

#211 The shūrenjō adopted a dojo-style of training—the popular method in the metropole. The youth who either volunteered to join or were selected first went through a physical check-up.21

The teachers organized the trainees geographically into six-person groups, based on which the youth conducted all activities, including eating, cleaning, and sleeping.22 Their daily schedule was rigidly designed, and demanded military-like punctuality. They woke up at 6 a.m. to the sound of a Japanese drum. Male youths ran to do misogi, a Shinto-style morning prayer in the ocean wearing only a fundoshi (loin cloth) as ritual. That became a symbol of Xinzhu's youth training center. After morning exercises and a simple breakfast of a bowl of miso porridge, they listened to lectures on Japanese imperial history, rural village problems, and moral stories.

Before or after lunch, they did outdoor activities, practicing martial arts, working at the construction site near the Shinchiku Shrine, plowing new land for vegetables, and marching through the city and mountains. After an hour or two of evening leisure time, they practiced seiza

(formal sitting) and listened to a concluding lecture before going to sleep at 9:30 p.m.23 A female participant remembers witnessing that “seiza on the hard floor was the hardest for farm youth, because their ankles were too stiffened to stretch flat.”24

The intense socializing experience at the shūrenjō produced strong group bonds equivalent to the fraternity that Japanese village seinendan members cultivated over years.

Painful training was a necessary component to create affective bonds between the trainees and the instructors as well as among the trainees themselves. Xinzhu's bi-weekly newsletter on kyōka

21 Peng Qingshun, Liao Dayan, “Nikki,” Dōkō 181 (October 5, 1938): 5. 22 “Shūritsu seinen shūrenjō kuniku no jissai,” Dōkō181 (October 5, 1938): 1. 23 Dai 13-ki shūren gyōji yoteihyō, 23. (Unpublished, 1941, provided by Xu Chongfa) 24 An interview with Jiang Zhaoying in Qionglin, Xinzhu province, on June 29, 2011.

#212 programs, Dōkō (The Same Light), framed the pain as trust-building experience. In a roundtable interview, the twelfth-term graduates gave examples:

The seiza sitting was the most painful. The first two times, I cried, but when I listened to the Governor's 50-minute lecture in seiza, it was surely painful, but I was happy that I !could finally bear the pain this long. !I used a pickaxe for the first time during volunteer labor, and I got a lot of calluses. !Doing misogi in the rain the first few times was very cold and I shivered. I left a few pieces of root vegetable at the first meal, but Teacher Yamada told me to eat 25 !them all, so I ate them with my eyes closed. I thought I could not take it any more. For the first time in their lives, the youth received intense attention from the Japanese instructors. There were three full-time Japanese teachers as well as one or two Taiwanese assistants. They lived in the same building, ate the same amount of the same food, and went through the same schedule together. In their personal letters, published essays, and roundtable interviews in Dōkō, the graduates appear to have developed respect towards the instructors through their everyday interactions:

The teachers even taught us how to scoop rice and hold chopsticks. Their kindness !surpassed our parents.' I do not know how to thank the teachers who I am sure have wives and children and !were committed so completely to our education. I cannot forget that Teacher Kitamura did not move even a bit during an hour-long seiza, !saying, “it hurts everyone in the same way, but you have to overcome that.” I will not forget that, when I had a pimple that was so badly swollen that I did not even 26 !touch it myself, Teacher Yamada squeezed the puss out for me.

25 “Dai 12-ki shūrensei ni kansō wo kiku,” Dōkō 244 (May 20, 1941): 6. 26 Ibid.

#213 Young women's training in shūrenjō started in July 1939 with female teachers. They also went through rigid training that emphasized physical exercise, although their afternoon activities focused on learning skills and manners that represented Japanese culture, including cooking, sewing, music, flower arrangement, archery, and dancing.27 They were told that an action as simple as washing one’s face was an opportunity to develop Japanese spirituality—a misogi for women.28 Like their male counterparts, the female trainees also developed close personal relationships with the teachers through living together and tried to meet their expectation. Huang

Chunwei from Beipu, who participated in the first-term women's training, wrote in her diary (a requirement in the training program):

July 13. Finally the day of going to the shūrenjō that I long waited for... there was a strict physical check-up, and two people did not pass. I did not know what to say seeing them going home disheartened. But how happy I was when I could enter the shūrenjō!..A teacher kindly applied medicine to my head... felt like a mother doing that... July 16...I asked Teacher Hoshi to teach us dancing for the women's patriotic song. I did not memorize it well when I practiced it just three of us, so I made a mistake and felt embarrassed. July 17... We took a bath before our teachers. Since I felt sorry, I decided not to go in the water... July 18... I have been following the teachers' words very well so far, but I think there are many things I do not notice... I hear some cried when teachers 29 !scolded them, but isn't that part of our training? The shūrenjō taught these youths to become leaders back in their villages, and the seinendan groups were the first targets they were supposed to influence. Dōkō exaggerated the achievements of the graduates in almost every issue. An article entitled, “A Shining Star of the

Village, a Warrior of the Soil, a Shūrenjō Graduate, Huang Kunxuan,” introduced the model young farmer and his father who were dedicated to new agricultural technologies and the

27 “Taibō no joshi shūrensei iyoiyo chikaku nyūjō,” Dōkō 199 (July 5, 1939): 1. 28 Kishiwa Tadashi, Joshi shidōsha renseikai. 29 “Shirayuri nikki,” Dōkō 200 (July 20, 1939): 5.

#214 Japanese language education in Yangmei.30 Another graduate Huang Rongzhe initiated activities that he learned in the shūrenjō in his seinendan in Zhongli—waking up 6 a.m., running to do misogi, and doing morning exercises or voluntary cleaning of the streets.31 “He became a totally different person,” the principal of an elementary school in Zhudong was reportedly stunned by the change in Xu Yaocheng's attitude. “That introverted, passive, and quiet boy was transformed, in a short period of time, into such an active and lively young man to the extent that I could not recognize him.... If every single seinendan member could go to the training center, how lively and worthy the Xinzhu seinendan groups would become!”32

Even if these graduates intended to play the expected role to invigorate the local seinendan as Dōkō advertised, in reality it was not always easy. They expressed their frustrations in their letters to the teachers they felt close to. “[We, a couple of shūrenjo graduates,] are working hard for the seinendan, but the participation rate is not great. Members are not united, and are individualistic and insincere.... Moreover, there are some shūrenjō graduates who have such wicked minds that I cannot believe they also went to the shūrenjō.”33 Another graduate also wrote, “when I clean up [the school] with the school principal in the morning, other people say

'she's showing off because she went to the training center' behind my back. I do not do it in order to be praised. I felt really lonely.”34

30 “Buraku no myōjō, tuchi no senshi, shūrenjō sgūryōsei Huang Kunxuan kun wo tou,” Dōkō 185 (December 5, 1938): 6. 31 “Miyo!! Wakoudo no moyuru tōshi wo!! Shinshin no shūren ni, kokugo buraku no kensetsu ni kekki seru Sekitō seinen bundan,” Dōkō 186 (December 20, 1938): 4. 32 Okumura Ryōtarō, “Seinen shūrenjō no shūryōsei wo kataru,” Dōkō 186 (December 20, 1938): 7. 33 A letter from Chen Fengjie (12th term female trainee) to Xu Chongfa, December 11, 1943. (Provided by Xu Chongfa) 34 A letter from Liu Chunzi to Xu Chongfa, August 15, year unknown (most likely 1943 or 1944). (Provided by Xu Chongfa)

#215 The graduates were also expected to influence their family members. The most important was to encourage their parents to learn Japanese. Dōkō published a message of shūrenjō student:

Mother, I thank you and aunt for visiting me at the shūrenjō from our far-away home. When mother visited me in the office, we talked a little in Taiwanese. I felt really terrible at the time. Since I decided that I would never speak Taiwanese during the one-month training, I felt embarrassed in front of those outside the room. Mother, please go to the Japanese language center and study hard. I want you to be able to speak in Japanese anytime with anyone as soon as possible.35

Such articles in Dōkō, fictional or not, pressured the young reader to tell their mothers to do the same. It became a goal to obtain a certificate for a “Japanese-speaking household” by educating the older people in their families.36 According to the gender roles in the Chinese culture and in Taiwanese past, it was a subversion of hierarchy for daughters to have achieved a level of learning above their parents. The September 1939 issues of Dōkō featured a series on the female trainee Zheng Liangmei, who fell seriously ill and died during the second term of women's training. On her deathbed, Dōkō reported, she talked in Japanese to her mother, who could not understand the language, and sang the Japanese national anthem Kimi ga yo. Zheng

Liangmei became a heroine of the shūrenjō, the equivalent of a soldier who honorably died in the battlefield.37

The Taiwan Patriotic Labor Youth Corps

Huang Yuanxing in Beipu and Xu Chongfa in Guanxi shared their experiences of going through the shūrenjō in interviews. Huang Yuanxing was born in Beipu on August 24, 1925, as the second son of a farming family, where his elder brother became the main source of family

35 “Okāsan e,” Dōkō 184 (November 20, 1938): 5. 36 “Okāsan ni 3-kanen keikaku de kokugo kyōju hajimemashita,” Dōkō 189 (February 5, 1939): 7. 37 “Kimi ga yo shōjo!!” Dōkō 203 (September 5, 1939): 8.

#216 labor after their father died. Although his family owned some land, unlike most of the farmers in

Beipu who rented land from the Jiang family, he remembered, “we did not have money, and [that is why] none of my seven sisters went to school but instead, five of them were adopted by other families in exchange for cash.” After graduating from the Beipu elementary school in March

1939, he continued into the upper-level years.38 However, he quit soon afterwards because a son of the Jiang family in the same class was a bully, and Huang had “a personal clash” with him.

Moreover, his family did not have money for him to continue into middle school anyway, he just wanted to help the family in farming. He did well in the village seinendan, which he joined immediately after dropping out of school. When he became the branch leader, the leader of the village seinendan (the Beipu elementary school principal) selected him to go to the shūrenjō.

“Everything was determined based on the schoolmaster's recommendation letter,” Huang reflected. He endured the painful time in the shūrenjō, where “the training was militaristic and strict—they had a very unique training called misogi… There was a teacher called Nemoto

Kenji, who I did not know was Taiwanese at the time, who was particularly strict. He often shouted loudly at us.”39

Huang Yuanxing found out that Nemoto Kenji had a Chinese name, Xu Chongfa, only after the end of Japanese colonial rule. When Huang met Nemoto Kenji at the shūrenjō, Nemoto spoke a sophisticated Japanese, exhibited Japanese mannerisms, and gained full trust from the other Japanese teachers. Nemoto, or Xu Chongfa, was the third son of a carpenter in Guanxi, and

38 The elementary school consisted of two parts: the first was six years of primary education, and the second was two or three years of upper-level education. After graduating from the primary program, children could either go to the upper-level education or other secondary education, including the middle schools, agricultural schools, and teachers' schools. 39 All based on the interviews with Huang Yuanxing in Beipu on May 9, 20, 30, and August 18, 2011.

#217 was only three years older than Huang Yuanxing. He was not Hakka, but grew up speaking both

Hakka and Holo. He had to give up middle-level education because the family could not pay for it, but he mail-ordered lectures from Japan and studied the entire curriculum of the middle school of Waseda University by himself while working as a carpenter. Even today, he looks upon the completion certificate that Waseda University mailed to him, dated April 1, 1939, as a personal treasure. He became the branch leader of the local seinendan, and went to the shūrenjō in 1941 when he was 17. Because of his outstanding grades on academic exams, Xu immediately became the representative of the 60 trainees, and gave a speech at the graduation ceremony.

For both Xu Chongfa and Huang Yuanxing, the next step of youth training, the Taiwan

Patriotic Labor Youth Corps [Taiwan kingyō hōkoku seinentai, or the Labor Corps], was a major launching point for their careers. The GGT started the Labor Corps program in March 1940, gathering 200 to 300 men of around 20 years old, to have them engage mainly in construction labor work for three months at a time. They went to one of the three sites of Taipei, Hualian, and

Taizhong, either to construct shrines, or to build a highway between Hualian and Taizhong.40 The purpose of the program sounded similar to other kinds of youth training—“through labor volunteer life and training, let them physically understand the essence of the Japanese spirit,

‘selfless patriotic service’ [messhi hōkō], and complete their character as imperial subjects by training their minds and bodies.”41

For government officials in Taiwan, however, the Labor Corps was not merely an extension of local youth training. It was the equivalent of military service. “In Korea, they started

40 “16-nendo ni okeru kingyōhōkoku seinentai no kunren,” Chihō gyōsei (June 1941): 25. 41 Ōta Toshio, “Hontō seishōnen no kunren ni tsuite,” Chihō gyōsei (June 1941): 6.

#218 the volunteer soldier program, and achieved a good result. We should not forget that the result of our Patriotic Labor Youth Corps has a special meaning. It is a good opportunity to measure the progress of youth in Taiwan.”42 Xinzhu officials repeatedly discussed the similarity of the Labor

Corps and conscription in Dōkō:

Unfortunately, there is no duty of military service for youth in Taiwan. The fact that you cannot participate in military service means, not only that you cannot directly stand at the frontier of national defense during these grave times, but also that you do not have an opportunity for the most serious group education where you obtain training in the real Japanese soul... The Patriotic Labor Youth Corps initiated by the GGT recently is the 43 !most appropriate facility for group education. Youth were exposed to an environment that convinced them that the Labor Corps was the equivalent of conscription. The official letter to convene the youths evoked the image of the conscription letter of which they had heard.44 When they came back from the service, they were called “reservist corps members” [zaigō taiin], imitating the respected title of the military reservists [zaigō gunjin] in Japan.45 “After returning to the village, I need to act differently as a reservist member... it would be useless if I am assimilated back to the village youth,” Xu

Chongfa, who joined the Labor Corps in Hualian, also wrote in his diary five days prior to the end of his service.46

It was already common to evoke the image of military service in Xinzhu's shūrenjō and seinendan activities. “When I was going to join the dojo [shūrenjō], —I hear that Japanese youth

42 Miyao naimu buchō, “Kingyōhōkoku seinentai ni toku,” Dōkō 217 (April 5, 1940): 1. 43 “Seinen shokun wa mazu dantai kyōiku wo ukeyo,” Dōkō 218 (April 20, 1940): 1. 44 Xie Kunhui, “Kingyōhōkoku seinentai e meiyo aru ōshō,” Seinen to Taiwan (June 1941): 25. 45 “Dai 4-ji kingyō hōkoku seinentai kaitai hōkokushiki ni okeru chiji kakka kunji yōshi,” Dōkō 243 (May 5, 1941): 3. 46 Xu Chiongfa's diary during the Labor Corps. October 1, 1941.

#219 are struck by solemn inspiration when they enter military service—I had a similar feeling,” one of the first trainees declared on a radio show.47 Not only the shūrenjō participants, but the instructors, too, took this to enhance the reputation of their program. “Citizens were all surprised by the vigorous marching of the shūrenjō trainees, singing military songs in a proud manner in and out of town, [they told us that] 'they look exactly like soldiers.'”48

Career Opportunities and the Sense of Rivalry

From the perspective of immediate interests, the point of going through the ladder of youth training—from local seinendan, the Xinzhu youth training center, to the Patriotic Labor

Youth Corps—was not necessarily to gain respect as a Japanized, disciplined, soldier-like figure.

More important was that this series opened up new job opportunities.

The career prospects for Huang Yuanxing suddenly improved in colonial youth training.

After returning to Beipu from Labor Corps service near Wushe in Taizhong, Huang immediately studied in the teachers' training program for four months and became an elementary-school assistant teacher in September 1943. In an interview nearly 70 years later, he emphasized that “I could only get a job because I went to the Labor Corps, but only the graduates of the shūrenjō were qualified to get in the Labor Corps... In order to go to the shūrenjō, they had to do well in the local seinendan... I felt lucky that, although I could not pursue school education, I was able to become a teacher just like those who went to middle school or normal school.” As the war continued, an increasing number of Japanese teachers and officials were conscripted, leaving positions open to local youth. Teaching was a popular occupation among rural youth, partly

47 Qiu Xionghao, “Taiken wo kataru kangeki aratanaru dōjō seikatsu,” Dōkō 191 (March 5, 1941): 5. 48 “Shimin no uwasa, shūrensei wa 'heitaisan no yōda',” Dōkō 182 (October 20, 1938): 5-6.

#220 because teachers had a significant presence in their everyday lives, and also because teachers and policemen could move onto other governmental positions.49 Although he retained bitter memories about his relations with the son of the Jiang family, he reflected that he had made the right decision in pursuing a career through youth training because, he said, “I did well in the end.” He continued as a schoolteacher until retirement 57 years later.50

Although Huang Yuanxing's career development was more common, Xu Chongfa also excelled as a rural youth. After coming back from the Labor Corps in Hualian in 1942, Xu was recruited to become an assistant instructor at the shūrenjō. The Japanese teachers gave him his

Japanese name, Nemoto Kenji, and under that name he played the role of the strict, sometimes intimidating, and spirited teacher until the end of the war. Even with his continuing belief in the value of Japanese-style youth training, Xu Chongfa reveals the importance of job prospects after training, saying that “the shūrenjō was popular because the graduates could become school teachers without going to normal school. Women could also become assistant nurses.” Another

Xinzhu resident who did not even join the seinendan, let alone the shūrenjō, also remembers that

“the Shinchiku shūreniō was famous because the graduates could become teachers.”51 The tightly controlled wartime economy caused a large number of people to lose their jobs both in

Japan and its colonies. Despite the wartime slogan of “Eight Corners Under One Roof” (or “a world united under the Japanese emperor”), ethnic discrimination was rife in the job market.

When “getting a job was extremely hard for Taiwanese people, and it felt like rising to heaven if

49 Miyajima Yutaka, “Hontō nōson seinendan shidō no jissai,” in Seinendan shidō ronbunshū, ed. Shinchiku-shū (Xinzhu city: Shinchiku-shū, 1932)132; Ts’ai, Taiwan in Japan's Empire Building, 56. 50 An interview with Huang Yuanxing in Beipu on May 9 and 30, 2011. 51 An interview with Huang Rongluo in Zhudong, Xinzhu province, on May 3, 2011.

#221 you could find a salaried job,” four months of intense training away from home—one month at the training center and three months at the Labor Corps—was a golden opportunity to broaden opportunity.52

Seeking practical benefits does not mean that these youth saw the Japanization campaign only instrumentally. Rather they defined their self-value according to the metric of Japanese nationalism, in which Taiwanese youth competed against one another. The rank system of the

Labor Corps, for example, fanned competitive feelings among youth from different provinces. As in the military, they all started as second-rank trainees, and they had two chances to move into the first-rank and then to the upper-rank. Xinzhu youth felt most competitive against those from

Taipei province. “Because the 200 members are all energetic, a severe competition among provinces has been taking place,” a participant in the first-term Labor Corps program wrote to the shūrenjō teachers, “it seems that there are many getting sick among the Taipei team, but we on the Xinzhu team are fortunately all doing well without any accident... There was an announcement of our grades on April 23, and 19 out of 24 Xinzhu members passed to the upper rank, whereas 11 out of 40 Taipei people did.”53 Newspapers frequently reported the number of upper-rank trainees from Xinzhu, and the Xinzhu Governor also pressured the prospective participants to garner even better results.54 Xu Chongfa's diary during his time in the Labor

Corps is filled with nervous feelings about the ranks. “I have to voluntarily engage in difficult works, and go home as an upper-rank trainee by any means!”55 The first thing that Huang

52 An interview with Jiang Zhaoying in Qionglin, Xinzhu province, on June 29, 2011. 53 “Kingyō hōkokutai yori genki na tayori,” Dōkō 220 (May 20, 1940): 7. 54 “Hōkoku seinentai no Shinchiku shūtai kaeru,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpo, May 28, 1940. “Dai 2-kai kingyōkōkoku seinentai ni taisuru Miyagi chiji no kunji,” Dōkō 227 (September 5, 1940): 3 55 Xu Chongfa's diary, July 12, 1941.

#222 Yuanxing remembered about the Labor Corps is the pressure to become an upper-rank trainee.

“Because the previous draftees from Xinzhu had achieved a good reputation and outstanding grades, I thought, as a Hakka youth from Xinzhu, I would do everything to become an upper- rank trainee.”56 He also thought the purpose of the shūrenjō was to train Hakka youth to beat other Taiwanese in their achievements at the Labor Corps.57

Provinces were not the only boundaries recognized by the competitors. They harbored animosity toward urban youth both in and outside of Xinzhu. “I thought those from urban areas have too many words but their practice does not live up to them,” Labor Corps reservists complained.58 In contrast, aboriginal youth, once the formidable Other in Hakka immigrants’ collective memory, were highly respected in youth training. They often wrote, “the Takasago zoku (aborigines) are pure and great.”59 During his Labor Corps service, Xu Chongfa felt ashamed when his skin was not tanned because the instructors often asked him to build furniture while other youths engaged in outdoor labor. Dark skin became a masculine symbol of hardworking rural youth, which also elevated the image of aboriginal youth.60

At the same time, a sense of rivalry with intellectual youth grew stronger. Among urban youth, those who had higher education degrees made Xu and many seinendan youth defensive about their lack of formal education. It hurt Xu, who was confident in his academic ability, when someone with a higher academic degree beat him in youth training: “Qiu Renzhang became the

56 Interview with Huang Yuanxing in Beipu on May 9, 2011. 57 Ibid. 58 “Zadankai kingyo hokoku wo kataru,” Dōkō 221 (June 5, 1940): 6. 59 Ibid. 60 Many of the letters from female graduates to Xu Chongfa, as well as an interview with Jiang Zhaoying in Qionglin June 29, 2011, mention how impressive the dark, skinny, strong bodies of male trainees were.

#223 top student among 300 of us. Alas, it should not be surprising because he is a middle school graduate.”61 When he late became the representative of all the upgraded trainees during the

Labor Corps, it meant more to Xu than just doing well as a Xinzhu youth, but as the achievement of someone who only had very basic schooling. Back in their villages, youth with only elementary education continued to hold the same feelings toward the well-educated. Huang

Xiuying, a female graduate of the shūrenjō, wrote to Xu in July 1945, frustrated by the severe competition to get a position in the village office. “What is it in a graduate of the women's middle school that is superior to me? I believe I am by no means inferior to her. Seeing the person who wasted three years studying [in school], I felt really miserable, but the society is on their side. Facing this issue, I felt that society is so pointless.”62

The formation of their identities and self-esteem as the rural, little-educated, hardworking

Xinzhu youth evolved around the personal ties and affection that developed in the shūrenjō. They called it “the home of our hearts” [kokoro no furusato], where they shared the frustrations and excitement they later encountered in the Labor Corps and also back in their villages. The solemn melody of Umi yukaba—a martial song about being prepared to die for one’s lord—represented the bond that developed between teachers and trainees, as well as among the trainees, who wrote to each other long after graduation.63 In their letters, they often said that they would work as hard as possible in the volunteer labor and at local seinendan inspections because they did not want to

61 Xu Chongfa's diary, June 9, 1941 62 Huang Xiuying's letter to Xu Chongfa around late February, 1945. 63 Wu Wentong “Shūrenjō no shosensei ni,” Dōkō 199 (July 5, 1939): 6 . The graduates received each other's addresses after the graduation. A coupe of letters to Xu Chongfa also say that the graduates continued to exchange letters.

#224 embarrass their shūrenjō teachers.64 It seems that Xu Chongfa revealed his background as

Taiwanese to female trainees more frankly and kept in close touch with them, maybe because he expected to find a potential marriage partner.65 These women called him “my elder brother

[anisama]” in return, and continued to seek advice from him.

This ladder of youth training institutions offered Taiwanese youth a space that functioned in a similar way to the Rural Youth Industry in Japan. Although the institutional set-up, the way it provided job opportunities, and the way youth shared the identity of “rural youth” differed,

Taiwanese rural youth gained a chance to “rise in the world” and challenge the dominance of urban youth through these institutions. They had no resume-writing experience as in Miyagi

Japan, but they saw each training institution as a rung on a career ladder. This similarly transformed rural youth from perpetual farmers to career-seekers.

The seinendan-based career opportunities were not available to all rural youth. On the one hand, after the participation in local seinendan groups became mandatory in 1937, it lost its attractiveness to upper-class youth who had appreciated the exclusive nature of the earlier youth groups.66 Those who aspired higher education were not interested in seinendan activities even if they resided in the countryside.67 Autobiographical novels written later by Taiwanese

64 Xu Chongfa's diary and many of the letters he received. 65 His marriage partner was decided by his parents, outside the youth training circle, however. He recalls that “then I thought I should let these female graduates know that I got already married.” 66 Miyazaki, Shokuminchiki Taiwan, 293. 67 Interview with Huang Rongluo in Zhudong on August 15, 2011. He lived in Nanzhuang, Miaoli in Xinzhu province. Since his grandfather encouraged his sons and grandsons to obtain higher education, Huang Rongluo also decided to attend the agricultural school and aspired to go to college later. He was “not interested in the local seinendan activities” although he knew they were gathering in the elementary school.

#225 intellectuals depict the role of village seinendan in a dismissive way.68 On the other hand, seinendan activities remained difficult to fully participate in for the poorest strata of farmers who struggled to survive. They could not afford leaving for four months for the shūrenjō and the

Labor Corps. During wartime, new opportunities opened up mainly for second and third sons of rural families, especially those who owned a small farm or shop.69 They could spare their labor, but could not afford higher education, in the same way as the families of Xu Chongfa and Huang

Yuanxing. The intensive kyōka campaigns during the 1930s pressured Taiwanese youth to

Japanize themselves, and once Japanese teachers and low-rank officials were conscripted and left

Taiwan, these youth had a good chance to fill their positions even when competing against more educated youth.

The Start of Fully Militaristic Training

The most significant change in seinendan activities after the late 1930s was the centrality of military drill. The GGT had been reluctant to promote overtly militaristic training until

Kobayashi Seizō became the Governor-General in 1936.70 Kobayashi did not immediately plan for the conscription of Taiwanese youth, but he regarded military training as the most effective method of Japanizing the population. Upon his inauguration, he requested the army to train

Taiwanese youth, saying that “it would be doubly beneficial if we train the finest Taiwanese

68 For example, Wu Zhuoliu, Ajia no koji (1956 repr. Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu ōraisha, 1973) and Zhong Zhaozheng, Zhuoliu (Taipei: Yuanjing chuban, 2005). 69 I collected 31 names of those who attended the shūrenjō from Beipu, and had Huang Yuanxing discuss their family backgrounds. Most of them, although their families originally engaged lived near the mountains, ran small shops by the late 1930s in Beipu town. Interview with Huang Yuanxing in Beipu on August 18, 2011 and Wen Qingshui in Beipu on August 23, 2011. 70 In 1926, when the Ugaki Kazushige cabinet introduced the youth training school [seinen kunrenjo] in Japan, for example, Taiwanese and Korean colonial governments went against the cabinet decision, and postponed it indefinitely for the reason that, without military service in effect, pre-military training was inappropriate for colonial societies. Kōbun ruijū 2A-11-rui 1587 “Shokuminchi ni okeru seinen kunren ni kansuru ken,” in Kondō Masami, Sōryokusen to Taiwan (Tokyo: Tōsui shobō, 1996), 39.

#226 youth and those who demand military service in our army—the smelting furnace of Japanese spirit—and the GGT takes charge of those who finish the training and let them supervise local youths.”71 Although the army refused his request, at the local level, simple military drills, mainly marching and basic commands, had already been incorporated in the training of youth groups.72

At the national level, the outbreak of the war in 1937 gave a go-ahead to seinendan supervisors.

As the war situation worsened, military service commenced in Korea and Taiwan. When the Japanese cabinet passed the Army Special Volunteer Soldier Program Act for the colonies in

1938, it was not implemented in Taiwan mainly because of concern about Taiwanese genealogical kinship with China. When the GGT finally launched it in 1941, army officials planned to start conscription in ten years after examining the result of the voluntary soldier program, but they decided to move the plan forward to 1944 in Korea, and subsequently began it in Taiwan in 1945.73

This delay of recruitment compared to its earlier start in Korea worried the Taiwanese leaders and led to an overheating of the kōminka (Japanization) campaigns.74 The movement to implement the volunteer soldier program was popular not only among pro-Japanese Taiwanese elites. The demand to implement military service had been coming from home-rule activists who viewed military service as a way to achieve equality between Japan and Taiwan since the late

71 Taiwan sōtokufu kanbō jōhōka, Warera no chōheisei (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1943), 33-4 in Kondō, Sōryokusen to Taiwan, 40-41. 72 For instance, the Shinchiku seinendan had a gym teacher of the Xinzhu middle school give drills to the members for three weeks in 1929 in preparation for its inauguration ceremony. They continued practicing army drills as part of training in the 1930s. “Shinchiku seinendan gunji kyōren,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, April 14, 1929, 5. 73 Kondō, Sōryokusen to Taiwan, 39-55. For more details, see Zhou Wanyao, “Riben zai Tai jun shi dong yuan yu Taiwan ren de hai wai can zhan jing yan,” Taiwa nshi yan jiu 2.1 (June 1995): 85-126. 74 Kondō, Sōryokusen to Taiwan, 44-45.

#227 1920s. Historian Kondō Masami argues that the most decisive call was the editorial of Taiwan shinminpō, which used to be the loudest anticolonial voice in Taiwan, published on August 10,

1940.75 The article demanded that Taiwanese people “display their passion and sincerity in their desire for military service.”76 Youth were viewed responsible for making military service possible in Taiwan.

In order to show that they were prepared, local seinendan groups began working closely with Japanese army officers and practicing army drills. In December 1938, the Xinzhu (province) seinendan conducted city- and county-level inspections. Army Lieutenant Colonel Iwasa Hiroshi, later an instructor at the shūrenjō, evaluated every move of the youth in these inspections.

“Regarding the straight-standing posture: 1. It is a pity that many move their eyeballs. Stare at one point and stand still. 2. Stretch the arms out fully. There are some whose mouths are open...”

Dōkō reported the details of Iwasa's evaluations so that “the supervisors and leaders of seinendan would read carefully and learn for the future training.”77

The army drills did not stop at the male young population. Female members of the seinendan also practiced basic drills. Dōkō reported, “[female students] used to be shy, and even avoided meeting teachers on the street, but recently female seinendan members do the training and troop marching confidently, emulating their male counterparts... During the inspections, they followed Lieutenant Colonel Iwasa's orders and commanded the troops in a very impressive way.”78 Even though these women would not become fighting soldiers, the officials saw military

75 Kondō, Sōryokusen to Taiwan, 34-45. Taiwan shinminpō was a Chinese-language paper but became a Japanese- language one during the kōminka movement. 76 “Shiganhei seido no jisshi wo yōbō: tōmin wa nessei wo hirō seyo,” Taiwan shinminpō, Autust 10, 1940. 77 “Iwasa chūsa ni yoru seinendan taikai saetsu,” Dōkō 187 (January 5, 1939): 5. 78 “Joshi seinendan no kyōren ni tsuite,”Dōkō 187 (January 5, 1939): 6.

#228 drill as an opportunity to teach Japanese discipline and as a way to demonstrate that the entire society was ready for military service. The army's top official, Tanaka Kiyoshi, lectured on the radio in 1941 that the coming Volunteer Soldier Program required the entire population of six million in Taiwan, “the young, old, male or female,” to be trained properly, “like in Germany.” In order to produce good-quality soldiers, female bodies as mothers were particularly important.79

The Warrior of Language and the Warrior of the Plow

In the middle of the fever for yet-to-come military service, the actual participation in the battlefields began in the form of military personnel [gunpu]. A far larger population of young men became military personnel than soldiers by the end of the war.80 Military personnel were the lowest rank in the Japanese military, even below conscripted horses and dogs. Their death rate was ten times higher than (Taiwanese) soldiers.81 Officials regarded them as “voluntary” participants, but in reality, many of them were drafted, especially at the beginning, and the military learned of many attempts by Taiwanese youth to escape by deliberately falsifying the registration of their residence. Japanese officials consequently emphasized recruitment of those who were somewhat Japanized already, such as those in the seinendan. The army also provided draftees with compensation of one yen a day, equivalent to the pay of a regular salaried job in

79 Tanaka Kiyoshi, “Taiwan tokubetsu shiganhei sei to kunren,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, July 3 and 4, 1941. 80 Based on the Japanese governmental statistics, 126,750 Taiwanese gunpu and 80,433 Taiwanese soldiers were sent abroad between 1937 and 1945. See Kashikuma Osamu, “Taiwan jūmin senbotsusha no izoku nado ni taisuru chōikin no hōritsu,” Taiwan kyōkaihō 400 (January 15, 1988): 5. 81 22.2% of the Taiwanese military personnel died whereas 2.7% of Taiwanese soldiers died in the battlefield. Ibid. 82 Kondō, Sōryokusen to Taiwan, 351-354.

#229 Taiwan.82 This strategy was effective and brought a rapid increase in voluntary participation from

103 participants in September 1937 to 1,953 volunteers the following month.83

Among military personnel, the vast majority, tens of thousands of Taiwanese youth, were hired as translators.84 Since the Japanese categorized Hakka as Cantonese, the Japanese army recruited many educated Hakka youth in Xinzhu province as translators of Cantonese or as schoolteachers to work in the Japanese-occupied region of Guangdong in southern China. Pan

Jinhe, who later became Xinpu village head, remembers that a group of young elites, including himself and Jiang Axin, a business leader from the Jiang family of Beipu, worked for the army in

Guangzhou doing propaganda tasks. “Cantonese people do not speak Hakka although we encountered a number of Hakka people and we could communicate. Because of the military’s needs, they made us learn the Cantonese and become translators… We Hakka learned it a lot more quickly than the Japanese did.”85 Once the Japanese forces occupied Southeast Asian territories in the early 1940s, the scope of recruitment massively expanded to include little- educated youth. According to the Japanese government the total number of recruits dispatched to

China and Southeast Asia numbered 126,750 by the end of the war, although the number of translators remains unknown.86 Xu Chongfa's second elder brother, Xu Chongyi, was serving the

Japanese military as an interpreter when he died on a battlefield in Burma.

83 Taiwangun shireibu, Shina jihen to hontōjin no dōkō 1 (Taipei: Taiwangun shireibu, October 1, 1937), and 3 (December 1, 1937). See Kondō, Sōryokusen to Taiwan, 353-354. 84 Kobayashi Seizō, Shina jihen to Taiwan (Taipei: self-published, 1939), 12 says as of 1939, there were XX000 Taiwanese translators. (The numbers were hidden for intelligence purposes.) 85 Yang Jingting, “Qilao fangtan,” Xinzhu wen xian 4December 2000): 18. 86 Kashikuma, “Taiwan jūmin senbotsusha.”

#230 In contrast to those interpreters, who were large in number but whose recruitment was an ad hoc process, the Taiwan Agricultural Corps [Taiwan nōgyō giyūdan] was more efficiently organized and served as a training program.87 Upon request from the army fighting in mainland

China, officials in Taiwan recruited 1,000 Taiwanese farmers around 20 years old and formed the

Agricultural Corps in April 1938. Their mission was to till the abandoned land and provide

Japanese soldiers with fresh vegetables. They were stationed in Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuchang,

Wuhan, later Anqing, and Hankou, for one year at a time, and were paid one yen a day.88 Their everyday life emulated the army; they had no freedom from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., and between agricultural work, they learned how to stand straight, respond to orders, march, raise their hands, and look like real soldiers. The program stressed the educational aspect—the military officers not only gave lectures on the cause of Japan's war in China, but also brought the youth to the villages that were burned and destroyed in order to impress them with the devastation of the losing side of the war.89

The stories of these youths were similarly symbolic and heroic compared to those of the

Labor Corps in the articles of Dōkō. The editors had already been stressing that farmers engaged in agriculture were equivalent to soldiers fighting in a battlefield.90 The Agricultural Corps was the ultimate embodiment of the “warrior of the plow.”91 Many pages of Dōkō printed the letters from the Labor Corps and the Agricultural Corps participants together to report frontier

87 The Japanese military deliberately kept the recruitment processes of the translators unclear for strategic reasons during the war but announced the number of Agricultural Corps openly. 88 Taiwan sōtokufu shokusan-kyoku, ed., Taiwan nōgyō giyūdanshi (Taipei: Taiwan sōtokufu, 1942), 37-40, 87-116, 169-222. 89 Ibid., 270-273. 90 Zou Yunyan, “Kama wa watashidomo no jūken de aru,” Dōkō 212 (January 20, 1940): 8 for example. 91 “Honshū shusshin no seinen butai 9 nin sorotte suki no senshi,” Dōkō 227 (September 5, 1940): 4.

#231 experience. Membership in the Agricultural Corps was not restricted to the seinendan, but many from Xinzhu province were seinendan members. They found the agricultural techniques in

Chinese villages so primitive that “invigorating the production requires the use of Taiwanese- style agriculture, and clearing and cultivating the land properly requires the involvement of

Taiwanese youth.”92 While developing their self-recognition as Taiwanese farmers superior to their Chinese counterparts, the Agricultural Corps, typical to youth training facilities at the time, also provoked rivalry between provinces. The Xinzhu youth participants proudly reported to

Dōkō that “we, from Shinchiku, are leading the other provinces and, with very few sick people, achieving good results. We enjoy a good reputation. I am so happy that we are doing better than those from the other provinces.”93

The Agricultural Corps was not only the first exposure to the battlefield for many

Taiwanese youth, but it also meant a major shift from the mountainous inner-land of Taiwan to lands beyond the island across the sea. Many of Xinzhu youth participated in the Agricultural

Corps with an intention to remain in mainland China after the one-year program and become long-term agricultural colonizers.94 Despite the difficult nature of the work, the Agricultural

Corps presented a new frontier to conquer, replacing the mountains in Taiwan with the Chinese continent, and later with jungles of Southeast Asia.

92 “Senchi dayori,” Dōkō 220 (May 20, 1940): 7. 93 “Dai issen yori,” Dōkō 227 (September 5, 1940): 6. 94 Out of 150 men who participated in the second-term Agricultural Corps from Xinzhu, 110 remained in China after the conclusion of their program, whereas only a quarter of the youth from the other provinces (155 out of 599) did. Taiwan sōtokufu shokusan-kyoku, ed., Taiwan nōgyō giyūdanshi, 246-247.

#232 “Volunteer Soldier Fever”

Once the Japanese army started recruiting Taiwanese volunteer soldiers in 1942, a

“volunteer fever” swept the island, even creating a “blood-application culture” since many youth signed applications in their own blood to express their “pure loyalty.”95 For 1,000 opening spots,

425,961 young people applied in the first year, and 601,147 in the second year. These were remarkably large numbers, considering the same “volunteer fever” in Korea saw 254,273 applicants for 4,000 available spots in 1942. Scholar Kondō Masami points out that this means that most of the eligible young men applied. The majority of the applicants came from farming families, despite the fact that volunteer soldiers were paid far less than military personnel.96 The numbers of applicants suggest that the government conducted campaigns to the extent that a distinction between coercive and voluntary recruitment becomes meaningless.

Social pressure was more severe in some cases than others. Seinendan members received the most direct orders and group pressure to apply. After a Japanese school principal encouraged the seinendan members in Xiangshan village in Xinzhu to apply, for example, every single member signed the form—male for the volunteer soldier, female for the volunteer assistant nurse.97 Other seinendan units submitted the members’ applications in groups, hundreds and thousands at a time. The hype for military service created in the various programs of youth training eliminated any real choice for graduates to decide for themselves whether or not to apply. Xinzhu’s official newsletter reported that youth rushed to the counter as soon as the city

95 Zhou Wanyao, “Riben zai Tai jun shi dong yuan,” 97-102. 96 Kondō, Sōryokusen to Taiwan, 371. 97 Ibid., 374. Another similar example is discussed in Miyazaki Seiko, “Moto-Taiwanjin tokubetsu shiganhei ni okeru ‘shokuminchi keiken.’” in Sengo Taiwan ni okeru : shokuminchi keiken no renzoku, henbō, riyō, eds. Igarashi Masako and Mio Yūko (Tokyo: Fūkyōsha, 2006), 61-92.

#233 hall started accepting applications, “almost like a battle scene.” The number of applicants in

Xinzhu reached 20,586 in the first two weeks.98 Being a proud imperial youth, Xu Chongfa felt not only the need to apply, but also the pressure to successfully pass the highly competitive examination. While he was working at the youth training center, he expressed his desire to attain the honor of volunteer soldier in his notes, “staying in the shūrenjō makes me a quiet person. I really hope I will become a volunteer soldier next year!”99

The seinendan provided an amplification effect for mobilization, in which their examples encouraged people to join the war effort, and that further increased the social pressure on seinendan members. The female gaze played a powerful role. Yang Qinghe expressed her excitement after watching youth play “Kokumin kaihei (All National People Are Soldiers)” presented in perfect Japanese by a seinendan group: “I was one of the audience moved so deeply… It was as if they had shown me a dazzling thing by suddenly opening a box… A feeling of intense surprise ran through my body. Taiwanese youth have matured so much!” Her excitement about seeing and hearing volunteer soldiers was almost a sensual one; “Late at night, when I hear military songs sung by those coming back from military drills, I immediately recognize ‘that is a soldier,’ and ‘that is a volunteer soldier!’” She was surprised to hear even her

Japanese female friend exhibited a similar excitement, saying, “they are volunteer soldiers!”100

Young women pressured their male counterparts in different ways. In the same way that young

98 Ichiyō sei, “Shiganhei, kenpeiho, kangofu, shūka seinen no sōshingun,” Shinchiku-shū jihō 58 (March 1942), 72-73. 99 Xu Chongfa, “Seinendan o megurite” (his diary), October 7, 1943. In interviews, he insisted that he passed the volunteer soldier exam but did not go because the shūrenjo needed him to stay. There is no paper trail or personal record that verifies this, a little odd considering the meticulous records on other details he has maintained. But if we are to doubt his account, his pride in “being the volunteer soldier” is even more telling about its prestigious nature. 100 Yang(shi) Qianhe, “Nisshōki no motoni: josei no tachiba kara,” Shinkensetsu 5 (March 1943): 50-51.

#234 women in the countryside of Miyagi formed an alliance against men who did not attend military drills, 140 female seinendan members in Zhudong country made an oath that they would not marry youth who did not apply for the volunteer soldier program.101 Similar stories were reported all over Taiwan. These reports pushed the previous campaign of abandoning arranged marriage even further, converting a woman’s right to choose her marriage partner into a woman’s power to influence “imperial defense” in Taiwan as well.

The prestige of the volunteer soldier elevated the status of rural youth and exerted pressure on intellectuals, too. Literature that supported the Japanization campaign (kōmin bungaku) directly connected the model rural youth to the volunteer soldier. It suggested the superiority of rural farmers over intellectuals in the discourse among educated youth. In the famous short novel from 1941, Shinganhei (The Volunteer Soldier), the young author Zhou Jinpo treated the act of applying to the volunteer soldier program as the final test for the internalized

Japanese mind.102 Although the novel narrates the dilemma of Taiwanese intellectual youth with deep sympathy, it ends in the triumph of the acts (submitting blood applications) of rural youth over the logic (rationalizing Japanese dominance) of intellectuals. Whether or not this idea

101 “Shiganhei wo shigan senu seinen towa kekkon sezu,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, January 14, 1942, 3. 102 The story starts with an ambivalence between two visions that support the Japanization campaign. One, argued by Zhang Minggui, a student who just came back from Tokyo, considers Japanization as a way to transplant modernization into Taiwanese society. This is the best reasoning he could think of, but it came out of his lack of hope as his life was deprived of all opportunities other than the ones offered by the Japanese. The other, presented by Gao Jinliu, a poor rural youth equipped with mastery of the Japanese language ability despite his minimal schooling, argues for the embodiment of Japanese-ness, including the embracement of Japanese deities, without seeking logical reasoning. It is the act itself that matters in Gao’s world, a view he acquired during his service at the Patriotic Labor Corps. After a harsh critique by Zhang Minggui calling Gao Jinliu a fanatic “blind horse,” the story ends with Zhang’s sudden surrender when he read the news that Gao submitted a volunteer application written in his own blood. “I cannot do such an act. I apologized to him like a man,” Minggui tells his brother-in-law. Zhou Jinpo “Shiganhei,” in Shū Kinpa [Zhou Jinpo] Nihongo sakuhinshū eds. Nakajima Toshiwo and Huwang Yingzhe (Tokyo: Ryokuin shobō, 1998), 14-37.

#235 resonated among educated readers, the bodily mastery of Japanese-ness won high prestige in an array of value in intellectual discourse.

Still, farm youth, selected after severe competition, soon discovered the same bitter feeling held by intellectual youth toward the consequence of Japanizing themselves. When the successful applicants joined the Japanese army after six months of additional training in Taipei, it was their first experience living within a Japanese social structure. Their superiors were mostly conscripted Japanese. Taiwanese volunteer soldiers found themselves far better qualified as soldiers than their Japanese colleagues, and yet the Japanese superiority in status was absolute.

They encountered violence and bullying on a daily basis from older Japanese soldiers.103 Their sense of humiliation was exactly what elite Taiwanese youth had experienced in the middle school and other Japanese dominated institutions of higher education since the 1920s.104 The more interactions with the Japanese they had in their cohort, the more frustrated Taiwanese youth became, especially knowing that they were the select few in their own society.

Total Mobilization and Social Change

The volunteer soldier program prompted change in social relationships. For average farm youth, it was the quickest way to subvert their peripheral position. But once total war mobilization started, labor and mandatory army conscription destabilized many social relationships in different ways from the volunteer soldier program. As the dependence of the imperial machine on colonial youth deepened, the relationships between colonizer and colonized and between the young and the old, in particular, found new dynamics.

103 Miyazaki, Shokuminchiki Taiwan, 291, for example. 104 For example, J sheng, “7-nenkan no kyōgaku seikatsu wo kaiko shite,” Taiwan minpō, April 1, 1938, 10.

#236 The devastation of the final years of war became apparent when the recruitment of factory boys [shōnenkō] started in 1943. Thousands of young boys—mostly thirteen- and fourteen-years old—were mobilized to build aircraft in Japanese navy factories. They responded to the earnest and forceful recruitment calls of their elementary school teachers in the Taiwanese countryside. Promised attractive pay and an engineering diploma within five years, approximately eight thousand Taiwanese boys headed to the “Navy C Factory” in Yamato city,

Kanagawa, in Japan. Once trained there, they were sent to factories across the country. These teenagers found harsh living condition, severe air raids, and frequent corporal punishment.105

The beginning of military conscription, although it was not planned when the volunteer soldier program started, did not surprise the Taiwanese. The government put it into effect in

September 1944 and officially conscripted youth in April 1945, mere four months before the end of the war. Taiwan had become a battlefield in March 1944 and saw severe air raids starting in

October of that year. When the first conscription examinations began on January 16, 1945,

Taiwan had just experienced another round of massive air raids that made it plain to all how organized and large in scale these attacks had become.106 Xinzhu was one of the areas hard hit by air raids.107 Beipu residents remember that air raid alarms went off nearly everyday and children had no time or mind to sit in classroom or study.108

105 See Taiwan shao nian gong de gu shi: Lu de hai ping xian, Shonenko, directed by Liangyin Kuo and Shuhei Fujita (2006; Taiwan, distributed by Taibei shi wen hua ju) as well as Wang Xiqing, “Ji Ri ju mo qi fu Riben wei ‘hai jun gong yuan’ zhi Taiwan shao nian xin suan shi,” Taiwan wen xian 48 (February 1997): 115-145. 106 “Tekiki matamata raishū,” Taiwan minpō January 4, 1945, 1. “Tada junchūmuni no ichinen: waga riku no wakazakura taran, tekishūka hatsu no chōhei kensa hajimaru,” Taiwan shinpō, January 16, 1945, 2. 107 For example, “Shinchiku-shi o jūtan bakugeki,” Taiwan shinpō, June 18, 1945, 2. 108 Interviews with Beipu residents in Beipu on May 9, 2011.

#237 Despite Japan’s lagging fortunes in war that betrayed the Japanese military’s sense of devastation, official publications advertised conscription and labor recruitment as the final stage of complete Japanization. Under such propaganda, the social hierarchy of Taiwanese and

Japanese populations was being re-defined. Author Ōsawa Sadakichi argued that the inevitable next step after mandatory conscription was to encourage Taiwanese-Japanese inter-marriage. He advocated it in order to “improve the genes of our offspring by mixing blood” and to provide

Taiwanese with “experiences with truly Japanese feelings and environments.”109 He anticipated that children of the resident Japanese families would marry Taiwanese locals and serve as hubs of communication between remote villages in the Taiwanese countryside.110 Conscription raised the expectation for Japanese residents to match the locals’ effort to become Japanese. In response to a Taiwanese commentator who argued that the perfecting of the Taiwanese people’s Japanese required more cooperation from Japanese residents, self-defense group [sōteidan] leader Li

Meishu complained in a roundtable discussion in Shinkensetsu, “I really want Japanese people to stop using sloppy Taiwanese language. Rather than speaking Taiwanese with weird accents, it is more important to speak Japanese all the way.”111 His condescension came out in the contrast between the proficiencies in each other’s languages. The devotion of Taiwanese to the cause fed a sense of moral superiority over their colonizers.

Universal conscription was a different animal than the volunteer soldier program, or even the recruitment of factory boys that promised a school diploma. The “mandatory” aspect of it was the opposite of the exclusivity accorded to the volunteer soldier, which was the key element

109 Ōsawa Sadakichi, “Chōheisei no tsugini kyōkon ga kuru,” Shinkensetsu 14 (November 1943): 17. 110 Ibid. 111 “Zadankai: Kokugoseikatsu no shinkensetsu,” Shinkensetsu (February 1944): 28.

#238 that had stirred volunteer fever. Still, the mood that celebrated masculinity and the excitement of wartime influenced many rural conscripts. Huang Yuanxin was one of those who readily accepted his conscription notification which he received while working as an assistant teacher at the Beipu elementary school.112 But there were many cases in which Taiwanese youth tried to escape the call to duty. Even in Beipu, where no clear anti-Japanese feeling existed since 1907, it was said that two young conscripts out of thirteen swallowed a bottle of soy sauce at their own send-off party and were sent to the hospital. The angry Japanese village head allegedly grabbed two middle-aged men in the crowd, one barber and one Chinese medical doctor, and pushed them into the car to make up for missing conscripts.113 Huang does not remember this incident, but recalls that there were people who tried to escape conscription.114 Whatever the truth of these rumors, they convey the frustration and fear aroused by fanatic mobilization among the villagers.

They were already subjected to the rationing of food, forced donation of every metal object, mandatory savings, not to mention the daily air raid alarms.

Ironically, the best way to escape conscription duty was to become a cog in the production line of soldiers. A well-known postwar author, Zhong Zhaozheng, a Hakka born in the same year with Huang Yuanxing in Xinzhu, intentionally escaped the conscription by entering a youth teachers school. This new program trained students specifically to become teachers of military youth schools [seinen gakkō] that were in great need in wartime. Zhong was

“the Other” kind of youth with whom Huang Yuanxing had contrasted himself—one of those educated in middle school who begrudgingly became an elementary schoolteacher in the

112 An interview with Huang Yuanxing in Beipu on May 30, 2011. 113 Chen Jiakang, Beipu qing huai (Beipu, Xinzhu: self-published, 2008), 21. 114 An interview with Huang Yuanxing in Beipu on May 30, 2011.

#239 countryside of Xinzhu. Typical among educated youth, he maintained a cynical view toward wartime mobilization. In his autobiographical novels and memoirs, he describes the youth teachers school as “a crappy school,” because it was full of Japanese students whose only goal was to avoid conscription like himself.115

During these last few years when Japan increased its reliance on youth, the colonial government expanded the cleavage between the younger and older generations more markedly.

Government officials attempted to maintain the pretense that youth and officials were on the same wavelength, calling on the “pure” youth to persuade their “ignorant old parents” if they opposed the youth’s desire to apply for the volunteer soldier program.116 Schoolchildren had served as the model for the rest of society in moral suasion campaigns, and they continued to do so during wartime. Nagata Tomiki, a teacher at the Beipu elementary school, noticed that it was popular among students to call each other by their Japanese names, even in letters. Contrasting this to Taiwanese elites whom he heard saying “even if we adopt Japanese names, we do not get any rights or one sen of profit,” the teacher deplored “why would they not be able to join the children and try harder?”117 Some Hakka parents considered this apparent divide-and-rule of generations a threat to their ethnic heritage. To stop their children’s rapid Japanization, some elite

Hakka parents started teaching them about the historical roots of the Hakka. Yet, this did not close their generation gap. Huang Guohui recalls that he developed hostility toward his father who preached to him about the proud historical origin of the Hakka in the Central Plain of the

115 Chen Wen Sung, “Shokuminchi shihai to ‘seinen’: sōtokufu no ‘seinen’ kyōka seisaku to chiiki shakai no hen’yō.” (PhD diss., University of Tokyo, 2008), 141-142. 116 Ōsawa Sadakichi, Rikugun tokubetsu shiganhei annai (Taipei: Kōmin hōkōkai, 1942), 3. 117 Nagata Tomiki, “Kōgakkō kyōin no nayami,” Shinchiku-shū jihō 46 (January 1941): 73-74.

#240 Yellow River. “I thought, ‘my father is uneducated and ignorant, is very conceited, likes empty talk, and gives me all kinds of bullshit orders,’ and began to despise him.”118 He even took out a

Japanese scholar’s book that his brother brought back from Tokyo and showed his father that his stories were mere myths or legends, “borrowing the authority of books and printed words.”119

The wartime mobilization made a scientific mind and unconditional faith both markers of

Japanized youth. By fanning the generational gap, the state attempted to ensure an effective alliance with youth and nationalize the empire.

Conclusion

The ladder of youth training programs—from village seinendan, the shūrenjō, the Labor

Corps, and the Agricultural Corps, to the volunteer soldier—finally created a space of upward mobility in the late 1930s in Taiwan that resembled the Rural Youth Industry formed in Tōhoku

Japan a decade earlier. Taiwanese youth shared a common identity as rural youth, found career opportunities, and attempted to subvert local social hierarchies. The high rate of schooling and literacy, as well as the significant presence of Japanese teachers in village life, contributed to the rapid establishment of this occupational and discursive space of rural youth. Like in Japan, the colonial government attempted to mobilize every individual in Taiwan in the last few years of colonial rule. Despite the large scale of mobilization, the Taiwanese version of the Rural Youth

Industry did not lead to a complete collapse as seen in Miyagi’s countryside. When Japan surrendered, youth like Xu Chongfa and Huang Yuanxing were still trying to enhance their careers.

118 Tai Kokuki [Dai Guofei], Tai Kokuki chosakusen 1: Hakka, Kakyō, Taiwan, Chūgoku (Tokyo: Miyagi shuppan, 2011), 112. 119 Ibid., 93.

#241 70 years later, Xu and Huang still do not hesitate to admit their embrace of Japanese nationalism, even arguing that Japanese-style youth training is superior to today’s school education. Yet they came to internalize the ideology of Japanese nationalism not because they evaluated and considered the ideology of the empire convincing, or because they were brainwashed by Emperor-centered preachings. No matter how emotionally committed they became, their motivations originated in more localized social contexts. The stories and records of

Xinzhu youth show how powerfully their grudge against the educated urban youth affected them, and only then they found the imperial preaching attractive. At the same time, this was not only about the grudges or resentment of the marginalized people. Urban intellectuals faced increased pressure because of the enhanced stature of uneducated rural youth. The colonizers were also pressured to match the effort of the Taiwanese populace. The war and its widespread nationalistic propaganda destabilized social hierarchies—urban-rural, educated-uneducated, gender, generational, and ethnic divides. The hope to improve one’s social positions by aligning with the state underlined the mechanism of Japanization in wartime Taiwan. ! ! ! !

#242 ![Changes in the Numbers of Seinendan Members in Taiwan] Miyazaki Seiko, Shokumin chiki Taiwan ni okeru seinendan to chiiki no henyō (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 2008), 88.

Male members Female members Male schooling Female schooling number of people number

year ! ! [Activities at the Xinzhu Province Youth Training Center (shūrenjō)] Provided by Xu Chongfa ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

#243 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

#244 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

#245 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! [The Taiwan Patriotic Labor Youth Corps (Taiwan kingyō hōkoku seinentai)] !Provided by Xu Chongfa

! !

#246

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

#247 ! ! ! ! ! Chapter 7: The Making of the Model Rural Youth in Colonial Korean Village— Kwangsǒk in South Ch’ungchŏng, Korea (1890s-1930s) !

Korea is often regarded as an industrialized colony in contrast to predominantly agricultural Taiwan. Yet the majority of the population lived in farm villages in the late 1930s even after the governmental investment in heavy industry in northern cities. The agriculturally- centered southern provinces in particular played an important role in meeting the empire’s needs for food. Agrarianism was a foundational ideology for the Government-General of Korea (GGK), especially in the Rural Revitalization Campaign which began in 1932. As in the earlier Local

Improvement Movement (1906-1918) and the concurrent Rural Revitalization Campaign in the metropole, military ethos, agrarian ideals, and Japanese nationalism came together in the colony.

Until this agrarian campaign, however, young residents in rural villages were isolated from the intellectual discourse on the rise of youth. Neither colonizers nor Korean local notables mobilized the pre-colonial hamlet youth gatherings for modernization projects as their counterparts had done in Japan. The youth activism for Korean independence popular in county capitals in the 1920s did not spread to remote villages, although it influenced some youth of landlord families. The story of Korean village youth until the 1930s was one of isolation from national movements—with the important exception of the March First Independence Movement

#248 of 1919—from state and county capitals, from rural modernity, and also from opportunities for social mobility. In the 1930s, with the onset of the Rural Revitalization Campaign, the center of gravity of youth groups shifted from county capitals to rural villages like in Taiwan, and these groups became a vehicle of Japanese nation-building.

Examination of the changes in the social status of “rural youth” between 1910s and 1930s in one local case, Kwangsǒk village, South Ch’ungch’ǒng, reveals the multiple internal boundaries that separated Koreans from one another. When Japanese colonizers settled in Korean villages, local societies had long been stratified through the centuries of Chosǒn rule

(1397-1897). Internal divisions based on location, occupation, education, class, gender, and generation shaped a complicated social structure for colonial authorities that sought assimilation of population. For this reason, the youth training programs in the Korean countryside, which turned into a space that I call the “Rural Youth Industry,” did not affect a wide range of farm youth. Yet those who could go to elementary schools constituted a new “middling-class” in the countryside and were able to use the ladder of youth institutions to create new social values, statuses, and opportunities. The story of an individual in Kwangsǒk, Kim Yǒng-han, shows how the new generation and class thrived in the Korean version of the Rural Youth Industry. Like Xu

Chongfa and Huang Yuanxing in Taiwan, Kim associated the youth training institutions with his career opportunities. Village youth like Kim internalized Japanese agrarian nationalism to assert their superiority over older generations and narrate their careers in local offices as success stories.

Many historians of colonial Korean villages discuss the colonial government’s suppression of Korean ethnicity, the capitalist exploitation of tenants, and the everyday resistance

#249 of villagers. Without denying the importance of these aspects of village life, looking at changing generational identities and aspirations for social mobility provides a different perspective on the colonial experience. The GGK could not mobilize the rural population for war without capitalizing on the psychology of rural youth. This does not mean that there was no resistance, or that all policies were successful or justifiable. A social history of rural youth mobilization in

Kwangsǒk shows that there were diverse experiences even in one village, and, at the same time, similarity across the empire in the way some young men turned state mobilization to social opportunities in their local contexts.

Kwangsǒk village in South Ch’ungch’ong

Japanese intervention in Korean politics and economy began before the formal annexation in 1910. Kwangsŏk village in the Nonsan region in the central part of what is now

South Korea saw a sudden influx of Japanese settlers at the turn of the twentieth century.

Villagers resisted these settlers violently when necessary. Despite these colonial tensions,

Nonsan region had more in common with Shida village in Miyagi than with Beipu in Taiwan.

Nonsan was a prominent agricultural producer, known for its massive fertile plain created by the Nonsan River and the larger Kŭm River.1 The Nonsan Plain belonged to the Sannam region (the “southern three”), which reportedly produced 70% of all rice consumed in premodern

Korea.2 The Plain alone produced nearly 45,000 tons of rice annually during the 1930s.3 The

1 Nonsan became an administrative county in 1914. 2 “Nonsan p’yŏngya nŭn namSŏne yusu 1,” Tonga ilbo, September 27 1927, 4. 3 Nonsan siji p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Nonsan siji, II: yǒksa wa munhwa yujǒk (Nonsan: Nonsan siji p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, 2005), 278. Rare for this mountainous peninsula, 60% of the Nonsan region is less than 100m above the sea level, making it a prominent agricultural production site even today. Yee Jae-Yeol [Yi Chae-yǒl], Kang Hee- Kyung [Kang Hǔi-gyǒng], and Seol Dong-Hoon [Sǒl Tong-hun], Ch’ungch’ǒng chiyǒk ǔi sahoeǔisik kwa chiyǒk chǒngch’esǒng (Seoul: Paeksan sǒdang, 2004), 39.

#250 Kŭm River, which runs to the Yellow Sea, had long been an artery for goods and people. From the seventeenth century until the 1910s, when new railroad systems replaced water transportation, the commercial hub of Nonsan region was a river port town, Kanggyŏng.4

Kanggyŏng was the last port where large ships could enter the Kŭm River. From there goods were re-distributed further inland on small boats. Because the town was also located on the inland route between Seoul and Chŏlla, Kanggyŏng was a hub of regional circulation. Rice, grains, cotton cloth, tobacco, fish, and a variety of products were traded in Kanggyŏng, and rice and grains from the region were sold as far away as Seoul and Cheju Island.5

After the Chosŏn government was forced to open its ports to foreign powers in the 1890s, the commercial opportunities in Kanggyŏng attracted dozens of Japanese settlers. After the Sino-

Japanese War in 1895 gave Japan privilege in Korea, more Japanese merchants came and formed a settler community protected by Japanese troops. The mixed communities of Korean locals and

Japanese settlers became common in provincial cities, where the settlers built their schools, shrines, and commercial unions separate from the Korean community. These merchants often ignored the agreements between the Korean and Japanese governments, illegally acquiring real estate and expanding their business, virtually creating a foreign concession in Kanggyǒng.6

4 It became the commercial center after the Imjin War in the late sixteenth century, in which the Japanese warlord Tokutomi Hideyoshi invaded Chosŏn dynasty, ruined farms and forced the population to turn to commercial activities instead. Nonsan siji p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Nonsan siji, I: chiri wa maul iyagi (Nonsan: Nonsan siji p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, 2005), 274-275. 5 Chǒng Yǒn-t’ae, “Nittei no chiiki shihai, kaihatsu to shokuminchiteki kindaisei,” in Kindai kōryūshi to sōgo ninshiki II: Nittei shihai ki, ed. Miyajima Hiroshi et al. (Keiō gijuku daigaku shuppankai, 2005), 5-9. 6 Ibid, 13.

#251 When Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910, the number of Japanese residents already exceeded one thousand, steadily increasing until the 1940s.7

In contrast to the urban settlement in Kanggyŏng which resembled the foreign settlements in Chinese port cities, the Japanese settlers in the Nonsan Plain saw their migration more as pioneering open land.8 This was despite that the southern provinces of the Korean peninsula were densely populated, and Nonsan could certainly not be characterized as “open land.”9 The first

Japanese settler in Nonsan, a native of Okayama, Miyake Suejirō, moved to Nonsan village from

Kanggyŏng in 1899. He sold merchandise to Korean farmers, particularly Japanese farming instruments such as tools for hulling rice. Other immigrants followed, but it was only after 1910 that the number of Japanese households surpassed a hundred.10 Nonsan attracted them because the introduction of railroads gave it easy access to major cities—it was less than 25 minutes to

Kanggyŏng and two hours to Taejŏn and Kunsan.11

The early settlers considered their experience a conquest and emphasized the danger they faced on a daily basis in their chronicle. The pioneer Miyake had to “avoid fiendish insurgents” to conduct his business.12 Nonsan was the frequent target of bandits who torched houses and

7 Ibid, 10. 8 Jun Uchida argues that colonizers viewed Korea as a colony of settlement, much like Hokkaido. She also makes an analogy of pioneers in the New World. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese settler colonialism in Korea 1876- 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 59, 62. 9 For example, in the 1930 colonial census, Nonsan county had the average of 231.6 people in one square kilometer whereas the national average was 95.4. Chōsen sōtokufu, Shōwa 5-nen, Chōsen kokusei chōsa hōkoku, dōhen Chūsei nandō (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1930), 2. 10 In 1911, the number of Japanese agricultural settlement reached 2,132 families (6,892 people). Among 1,129 Japanese farming families in South Ch’ungchŏng, 677 were landlords, 114 were owner-cultivators, 196 both owned and rented land, and 115 were tenants as of 1932. Japanese-owned land was 21,137 cho of rice paddies, 10,868 cho of fields in the same year. Minjok munje yŏn'guso ed, Ilche ha chŏnsi ch'ejegi chŏngch'aek saryo ch'ongsŏ 55: chiwonbyǒng, chingbyǒng 1 (Kyŏnggi-do Koyang-si: Han'guk haksul chŏngbo, 2001), 255, 290, 294. 11 Tomimura Rokurō, ed., Chūnan Ronsan hattenshi (Tokyo: Kihara Junichirō, 1914), 1. 12 Ibid., “Miyake Suejirō” photo caption.

#252 robbed valuables. The Righteous Army, anti-foreign local volunteer troops, attacked the Japanese residents in Nonsan in 1907.13 A short chronicle written by Nonsan’s Japanese settlers in 1914 argued that security was a serious problem for both Japanese and Korean residents. In 1906, when there were only eleven Japanese households, they requested that the provincial government establish a police post. The chronicle highlighted the mistrust between Korean and Japanese residents. In one episode, Korean vendors panicked at the alarm bells rung by the Japanese to warn of approaching bandits, believing that the Japanese were going to enslave them as laborers.14 Through anecdotes of miscommunication, mistrust, lawlessness, and the slow pace of

Korean agricultural production, the Japanese settlers depicted Nonsan as a new frontier to conquer.

The Japanese settlers created the image of an “uncivilized land” perhaps to counter the self-image of local notables in South Ch’ungchŏng. The area along the Kŭm River was once the political and strategic center of Paekche, one of the ancient Three Kingdoms (52-668). Chinese culture, religion, and technology was transmitted from this region to Japan.15 Yǒnsan in Nonsan was considered a candidate for the capital of the new Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1897). The region was famous for its tradition of neo-Confucian scholarship (Kiho school), and a large number of literati yangban families lived in the Ch’ungch’ŏng provinces—nearly 41% of the entire yangban class.16 These scholarly families were considered themselves a bastion against

13 Nonsan siji p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Nonsan siji II, 28. 14 Tomimura, Chūnan Ronsan hattenshi, 9-16. 15 Chǒng Yǒn-t’ae, “Nittei no chiiki shihai,” 43-46 16 See Nonsan siji p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Nonsan siji II, 25−223 for more detailed history of this region. Sǒ Sun- hwa, “Ch’ungch’ǒng chiyǒk chuminǔisik ǔi sahoesajǒk ilkoch’al” in Hosǒ chibangsa yǒn’gu, ed, Hosǒ sahakhoe (Seoul: Kyǒngin munhwasa, 2003), 437.

#253 modernization programs promoted by new generations in Seoul at the turn of the twentieth century.17 They often looked down on Japanese settlers—many of whom came from lower social strata—as uneducated, materialistic barbarians.18

How did the environment of villages in Nonsan compare with the villages in Taiwan and

Japan? A typical farm village on the northern edge of Nonsan county, Kwangsǒk, had a stark difference with Beipu in Taiwan in the nature of the local community before colonization. Beipu was a frontier for Hakka immigrants where the youthful talent and physical courage were highly valued. The presence of conflicts between the Hakka and the aboriginal peoples enabled

Japanese colonizers to use their position to mediate between them, while Hakka residents took advantage of the colonial partnership to expand their dominance and business. In contrast, rural areas in Korea had long established class and generational hierarchies with landlord families standing between the central state and peasant communities.19 The Japanese settlement in

Kwangsǒk, which was four times larger than that in Beipu, caused a sudden disruption to the existing social dynamic.20

17 Ch’ungch’ǒng-namdoji p’yǒngch’an wiwonhoe, Ch’ungch’ǒng-namdoji (Taejǒn: Ch’ungch’ǒng-namdoji p’yǒngch’an wiwonhoe, 1965), 264. 18 This criticism remained strong even in the 1920s, particularly in Tonga ilbo. Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 208-209. 19 Many local ruling families expanded their holding of farms in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Lee Hae-Jun [Yi Hae-jun], Chōsen sonraku shakaishi no kenkyū, trans. Inoue Kazue, (Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppan kyoku, 2006) gives a deeply historical, excellent study of the social relationships between the local ruling elite, peasant communities, and the state. 20 Japanese migrants aggressively expanded their land ownership through purchase, loan business, or programs of the Oriental Development Company. By 1935, there were 40 Japanese households and 172 Japanese residents in Kwangsŏk. Nonsan-gun, Kwangsǒk (Nonsan: Nonsan-gun saemaul-kwa, 1992), 24. In the same statistics, the total number of residents in Kwangsŏk rose to 9,429, more than four-fold rise since the survey conducted 1909. This might be owing to the more thorough recording measures in the 1930s. By the 1930s, in the Nonsan plain, the Japanese settlers set up eight large farming companies. Nonsan siji p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Nonsan siji II, 279. Gragert argues that Japanese settlement did not disrupt the existing patters of landholding and small-scale agricultural production. Edwin Gregert, Landownership under Colonial Rule: Korea’s Japanese Experience 1900-1935 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 109-110.

#254 Japanese schools and schoolteachers in Korean villages did not establish roots as quickly as those in Beipu and they had less interaction with their Korean neighbors even in the 1920s. In

Korea, the education system had long been monopolized by the yangban literati class. Kwangsŏk had 29 yangban families in 1909.21 The elite scholars of the village studied in the Nogang

Academy and ran small private schools [sŏdang].22 After the Japanese victory in the Russo-

Japanese War (1904-5), the prominent yangban and largest landholder (about 3.5 km2) in

Kwangsŏk, Yun Chi-byŏng, established a new private school in 1911.23 The Usin School provided six years of education to relatively well-off residents, both male and female, including training in the Japanese language and agricultural skills. Yun Chi-byŏng’s son, Yun Hŭi-jung, continued to develop its curriculum over the years. But unlike the school in Beipu, which became a public elementary school after three years of colonial rule, the Usin school remained a private institution until 1929.24

Japanese police remained a powerful presence in the Korean village especially during the uprisings of the Righteous Army before the annexation in 1910 and during the March First

Independence Movement in 1919. In Kwangsŏk, 200 people gathered to demonstrate in

Ch’ŏndong hamlet on April fourth of 1919. The Japanese police cracked down on them, shooting

21 Out of a total of 430 households. The numbers were based on the Statistics of People’s Registration (民籍統計表 1909) cited in Nonsan siji II, 226-229. The (overlapping) number of farming families was 308. The total number of population was 2,063. But the numbers of the unregistered households and farming families were big in the statistics compiled in 1909. The 1930 census recorded 1,570 households and 8,148 residents. 22 Nonsan-gun, Kwangsǒk, 30. 23 As an individual (not a company), the Yun family owned the second largest land in Nonsan county, a few times bigger than farms owned by Japanese landholders. Nonsan siji p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Nonsan siji II, 281-282. 24 The Yun family in Kwangsŏk was a branch of the P’ap’yŏng Yun family, a prominent yangban clan in South Ch’ungchŏng. Nonsan-gun, Kwangsǒk, 31. Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda: Chibang haengjǒng, 1930 yǒndae esǒ 1950 yǒndae kkaji, (Kwach’ang-si: Kuksa p'yǒnch'an wiwonhoe, 2006), 9. An interview with Kim Yŏng-han in Taejǒn on February 13, 2012.

#255 and killing one of the villagers.25 The presence of the police remained strong in the 1920s.

Scholar Edmund de Schweinitz Brunner wrote a report on rural conditions in Korea: “Japan’s greatest social influence on the local community [was] exerted through the police.” He observed that the police took charge of a wide range of regulations from burial permits to passport applications.26 Although the police had similar functions in Taiwan, at least the Hakka people in

Xinzhu perceived them as playing a mediating role between them and aboriginal groups, whereas in Korea, they deepened the gap between the colonial authorities and the local residents.

The social environments of Kwangsŏk, including the role of young people, had more in common with those of Shida village in Miyagi. Both were predominantly rice-growing farm villages, adjacent to county centers, Nonsan and Furukawa, respectively. Kwangsŏk’s access to provincial cities— Kanggyŏng, Taejŏn, and Kongju—was similar to Shida’s to Sendai. Both villages had patriarchal family institutions, the yangban in Kwangsǒk and landlord families in

Shida, which maintained local labor relationships and prevented the fragmentation of land.27

Korean and Japanese hamlets also depended on horizontal ties that allowed peasants to preserve space separate from the ruling class. Indeed, the Korean social guilds, kye (), much resembled the guild associations [keiyaku kō] in Miyagi. Under the kye, 10-20 people formed labor-sharing units, ture (). They were similar to Japan’s pre-Meiji youth groups, as they

25 Nonsan-gun, Kwangsǒk, 81-82, 92, 107-108. 26 Edmund de Shweinitz Brunner, “Rural Korea: A Preliminary Survey of Economic, Social, and Religious Conditions,” in The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems, ed. International Missionary Council (New York City: International Missionary Council, 1928), 135-136. 27 The yangban was based more strictly on blood heritage and functioned primarily as literati-bureaucrats. Scholar Lee Hae-Jun and many others argue that the strictly patriarchal family organization of the Korean yangban class only developed in the late seventeenth century, when the central Chosŏn government promoted neo-Confucianist ideology. For ruling yangban families, the patriarchal lineage was a means to prevent the fragmentation of the limited landholding, as well as to maintain local ties when peasant communities under their rule obtained more autonomy. See Lee, Chōsen sonraku shakaishi no kenkyū.

#256 were associations of working-age men, whose activities were not limited to agricultural labor but included entertaining, dancing, drinking, and other kinds of peer bonding.28 The fact that groups of ture in multiple hamlets cooperated with one another, even coordinating peasant and political uprisings in the nineteenth century, was similar to the political activism of the Japanese hamlet youth groups in early Meiji.29 The ture, however, were not mobilized for modernization projects like the youth in Shida. A few colonial officials who attempted to transform kye to do so did not succeed until the 1930s.30

Despite the similarities, there is no indication that the Japanese settlers in Kwangsǒk recognized these aspects of Korean rural villages. They showed little interest in discussing the

Korean community in their chronicle. It was not until Japanese ethnographers conducted research on Korea’s farm communities in the 1920s that they started to record the functions of the guilds and labor-sharing groups. This increased attention to rural communities among

Japanese bureaucrats and scholars coincided with a nation-wide movement to mobilize local youth groups by Korean nationalist and socialist activists.

Youth Groups in Nonsan in the 1920s

During the 1920s, national movements focusing on “rural youth” expanded rapidly. Anti- colonial nationalist and socialist leaders viewed the spread of local youth groups in county capitals as their expansion of influence. But the groups in Nonsan engaged mainly in generational power struggles rather than ideological ones. Like the Taiwanese elite youth groups

28 On ture, see Ch’oe Chae-sǒk, Kankoku nōson shakai kenkyū, trans. Itō Abito and Shima Mutsuhiko (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1979), 276-278. 29 Lee, Chōsen sonraku shakaishi no kenkyū, 81-92. 30 For example, Ohara Shinzō, “Chihō shinkōkai no sōsetsu,” in Chōsen tōchi no kaiko to hihan, ed. Kida Chūei (Seoul: Chōsen shinbunsha, 1936), 55-58.

#257 that swung between colonial and anti-colonial affiliation, the ideology did not necessarily occupy the minds of local leaders. The rise of “rural youth” in the intellectual discourse in the 1920s, mainly used by local leaders already in power as well as the younger educated elites to establish their sphere of influence, did not accompany mobilization of average farm youth in remote villages.

In county capitals, a number of new youth groups were established after the crackdown of the March First Movement. Their missions were cast in the language of political ideologies— self-strengthening, anti-colonial nationalism, class struggle, or hyǒksin (progressive reform). For the newly-launched Korean-language newspapers, the Tonga ilbo and Chosŏn ilbo, the rapid spread of youth groups was a sign of a new politics. Urban centers of the Nonsan region joined this nation-wide trend, with the formation of the Kanggyŏng Youth Group, the Nonsan Youth

Club, the Taejŏn Youth Club, and many others. At the same time, these groups were organized by local leaders already in their fifties and even sixties. They showed a strong continuity, rather than a break, with earlier years and reinforced the old social hierarchy. Some of them were simply

“renewed” from previous groups, whose members were colonial bureaucrats, schoolteachers, and county local officials.31 The first youth group in South Ch’ungch’ŏng, Nonsan Youth Group, was established in 1917. Its leader, Ch’oe Tal-sun, was a land survey technician working for the

GGK. Ch’oe continued to preside over the Nonsan Youth Club when it was “re-established” in

1920.32 The goals echoed the familiar phrase of Japanese seinendan activists, “moral training

31 Hŏ Chong, “Ilche sigi Ch’ungnam chiyǒk ǔi ch’ǒngnyǒn undong,” in Ch’ungnam chiyǒk maul yǒn’gu: pigyo wa chonghap, ed. Kim P’il-tong (Seoul: Minsokwon, 2011), 89-91. 32 “Nonsan ch’ŏngnyŏn kurakpu chojik,” Tona ilbo May 8, 1920, 4; “Kongju ch’ǒngnyŏnhoe,” Tonga ilbo July 6, 1926, 4; “Nonsan ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe,” Tonga ilbo, September 29, 1927, 4.

#258 [suyang] of the spirit,” rather than promoting social change or Korean nationalism.33 The historian Ji Soo-gol [Chi Su-gŏl] calls these groups “advisory institutions for county governance”34 because the members tended to have their careers in local offices, such as village advisory councils and credit unions.

Their ambiguous political color showed the unclear boundary between colonial and anti- colonial movements in provincial towns as in 1920s Taiwan. The close association of older leaders with colonial administration did not necessarily hinder them from supporting the Cultural

Movement advocated by Tonga ilbo and nationalist leaders. They emphasized the importance of modern knowledge, moral training, and physical health. They invited students from Seoul for public speeches and organized amateur plays to spread enlightenment ideas to fight “feudal” customs. In fact, they did not have to choose between a pro-GGK or pro-nationalist position as long as they adhered to the enlightenment and modernization goals advocated by both sides.

Potentially, night school courses might reveal political leanings, but the youth groups in Nonsan did not provide many night classes.35 Local youth groups often showed their active support for the movements initiated by nationalists to establish a private university and promote domestic production.36 But these goals reflected an elite vision of national sovereignty and soon foundered without gaining much support from the people.

33 “Kanggyŏng ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe chojik,” Tonga ilbo May 30, 1920, 4. 34 Ji Soo-gol [Chi Su-gŏl], “Ilche sigi Ch’ungnam Puyǒ, Nonsan-gun ǔi yuji chiptan kwa hyǒksin ch’ǒngnyǒndan,” Han’guk munhwa 36 (December 2005): 207. 35 When they taught, they offered classes on Hangŭl, the Chinese classics, math, Japanese, English, accounting, law, and economics to the urban populace. Schoolteachers from colonial elementary schools usually took charge of them “Yangch’on ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe yahakhoe, Tonga ilbo, February 7, 1922, 4; “Kanggyŏng ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe yahak sŏllip,” Tonga ilbo, February 7, 1923, 4. Hŏ Chong, 93-97. 36 For example, see “Mindae Nonsan-gunbu,” Tonga ilbo, May 30, 1923, 4.

#259 Compared to the local youth groups aligned with the anti-colonial movement of the

Taiwan Cultural Association, youth groups in Korean provincial towns appeared more active but also more confrontational with one another. The hyǒksin (reform) movement in 1925 sparked generational conflicts in Nonsan. Younger members saw the generation in power as obstacles to a new Korea. In their eyes, the older members lacked the will to change the old social order. The young members in Nonsan youth groups advocated new age limits of 16-30, but could not expel the older members. In most cases, older generations continued in power, forcing the newer forces to break away from the group. By 1927, Nonsan had eight (conservative) youth groups, two proletariat youth groups, two labor youth groups, and two “equality” [hyŏngp’yŏng] youth groups.37 The newly formed youth groups competed against one another, leading at times to violence.38 The leftist youth groups in regional towns rose and fell until they were completely crushed by police forces by the end of the 1920s.

While generational conflicts, cloaked in ideological rhetoric, divided local leaders in county capitals, in Kwangsǒk the rise of “rural youth” only influenced the son of the largest landlord in the village, Yun Hǔi-jung. Like Katō Einojō in Miyagi, Yun’s initiative simultaneously had pro-establishment and rebellious characteristics. He converted his house to a night school classroom to teach Japanese, Korean, math, and the Chinese classics. More than 80 children and working youth gathered to study. His brother-in-law, Cho Dong-sun, served as the main teacher.39 Like Katō, Yun and Cho were in their twenties and might have considered their

37 “Nonsan p’yŏngya nŭn namSŏn e yusu 3,” Tonga ilbo, September 29, 1929, 4. 38 “Minyuhŏe p’okheng sagŏng,” Tonga ilbo, October 3, 1926, 4, for example. 39 “Yun-ssi ǔi kyoyuk yŏl,” Chosŏn ilbo, January 2, 1923, 4; “Kwangsok-myŏn e nodong yahak,” Chosŏn ilbo October 16, 1923, 3.

#260 night school a youthful, rebellious act. A local historian argues that both were sympathizers of leftist thought to the extent that Cho and Yun’s family members later migrated to North Korea during the Korean War.40 Perhaps his educational programs incorporated socialist ideas. Perhaps

Yun Hǔi-jung was motivated by an in-family generational tension or other personal agenda, as was the case for Katō Einojō. In any case, Yun’s leadership made little change in the class hierarchy, but reinforced it. Despite his interest in socialist activism, Yun stayed away from the youth group politics in adjacent towns and did not mobilize ordinary village youth to confront colonial rule.

The Rural Areas in Assimilation Policies

During the 1920s, the GGK attempted to control youth groups by cracking down on the leftist and Tonga ilbo-led youth groups and by offering workshops and study tours for other, less subversive, youth.41 The greatest obstacle in this effort came from Japanese settlers, whom Jun

Uchida calls the “brokers of empire.” Many Japanese settlers opposed the assimilation programs advocated by the colonial government since the 1910s. Their attitudes did not help the GGK to reach the Koreans, but instead intensified hatred for the Japanese.42 Although the shock of the

March First Movement led some settler organizations to advocate ethnic harmony, everyday encounters between Japanese and Koreans were characterized by ethnic tension, particularly in the cities.43 In 1921, a top GGK bureaucrat Moriya Eifu pointed out the problematic behavior in

Korea in a lecture to middle school principals:

40 No documents prove the validity of this information, but Kim Yong-han, a friend of Yun’s family and a local historian of Nonsan, clearly remembers it. An interview in Taejǒn with Kim Yong-han on November 23, 2011. 41 Kim Yǒng-hǔi, Ilche sidae nongch’on t’ongje chǒngch’aek yǒn’gu (Seoul: Kyǒngin munhwasa, 2002), 475-476. 42 Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 150-151 43 Ibid., 143-187.

#261 Japanese rule is successful in developing industry, improving administration, and maintaining order… Korean people always say that they appreciate these developments, but they prefer that Japanese people give their hearts and deep trust to Koreans to the extent they could die together… The attitude of Japanese toward Koreans has been carping in big and small details, almost like that of a stepmother. It is said that Russia, like a stepfather, is more likable than a stepmother Japan that pokes everything with a 44 !sharp needle. The GGK perceived the situation in the countryside differently. Although earlier settlers had had an attitude of conquerors, those who settled as tenant farmers had been cooperating closely with Korean farmers. While pointing out shameful behavior of city residents, colonial officials applauded Japanese tenant farmers for building friendship with the locals. One of the settlers in Kwangsŏk village, Aoki Kihachi, received a page of praise in the government journal,

Chōsen (Korea), for his assimilation to the community. He settled in Kwangsŏk in 1911 and became a tenant of 16,000m2 of the Kunitake Farm Company.

Mr. Aoki learned Korean as soon as he arrived in Korea, associates with Korean people with politeness, does not produce discrimination … He always does manual labor together with Koreans, does his best to attend their gatherings, never opposes community activities, invites hamlet residents to drinks and cakes on the New Year’s 45 !Day, and never changes his attitude. Rural areas were better positioned to achieve the assimilationist goal in the eyes of GGK officials. Building village youth groups, in particular, was a way to reach their everyday lives.

The spread of elementary schools, however, which had been a prerequisite for youth training in

Japan, was slow in Korea. Because colonial officials did not readily approve public elementary schools, and also because the pre-colonial tradition that linked education to elite male culture, access to elementary education was extremely limited in the countryside. In this milieu, private

44 Moriya Hideo, Chōsen no kaihatsu to seishinteki kyōka no hitsuyō, (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1924), 18-19. 45 “Naisen yūwa no kōtenkei: Ronsan no Aoki Kihachi shi” Chōsen 100 (July 1923): 207.

#262 schools run by local elites, sŏdang, appeared to have potential for developing youth groups. In the report on youth group guidance, South Chŏlla officials argued,

The sŏdang is already the place of learning for youth in hamlets and villages between farming seasons… Although the students of sŏdang do not identify themselves as youth groups yet, but we think that, in the future, they might offer the most appropriate 46 !conditions should we want to form successful [youth] groups. In Kwangsǒk, Yun Hǔi-jung and his Usin School were seen as facilitators of rural assimilation.

After the Usin School became a public elementary school in 1929, it did indeed serve as a basis for the youth training institutions that developed in the 1930s.

Shifting attention to the countryside in the 1920s, the GGK produced a series of studies on Korean rural lives. In 1922, for example, Kon Wajirō, an architect and folklorist then specializing in Japanese rural houses and a student of Yanagita Kunio, traveled through Korea to study living conditions. With his trademark detailed sketches, he offered a fresh look at Korean housing in both urban and rural settings. Throughout his study, he stressed the rationality and natural beauty of Korean houses, and sometimes their superiority to those of the Japanese. In the introduction to his report he wrote, “I saw slums. I saw that they were unexpectedly beautiful… not like the dirty ones we see in Japan.”47 In the countryside, he was fascinated by the ondol

(floor heating): “In Korea, no matter how primitive the house is, there is ondol. Japanese primitive houses do not even have tatami mats.”48 Other scholars studied different aspects of

Korean rural life.49 Most famously, Zenshō Eisuke, GGK’s leading researcher of Korean affairs,

46 Zenra-nando naimu-bu, Seinenkai shidō hōshin (Cholla-namdo: Zenra-nando naimu-bu, 1922), 20. 47 Kon Wajirō, Chōsen buraku chōsa tokubetsu hōkoku, (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1924), 4. 48 Ibid., 34 49 For example, Odauchi Michitaka, a Japanese specialist on rural living and education, conducted a study on the slash-and-burn peasants in the Korean countryside in 1923. Odauchi Michitaka, Chōsen buraku chōsa hōkoku: kadenmin raijū Shina jin (Chōsen sōtokufu, 1924).

#263 compiled massive volumes on various kye, hamlet organizations, social customs, and clan-based communities, as well as Korean economy and industry in the 1920s.50 The GGK attempted to revive the traditional characteristics of Korean village organizations as units that could implement moral suasion campaign at the grassroots level. Although similar romanticism of local cultures led to associationism in other empires, the Japanese empire celebrated local characteristics to achieve the assimilationist goal.

The Rural Revitalization Campaign

In the depression, Korean villages became increasingly impoverished. Governor-General

Ugaki Kazushige launched the Korean version of the Rural Revitalization Campaign in 1932. As the rhetoric of wartime urgency increased over the course of the 1930s, the GGK demanded greater cooperation from the wider population for the sake of national-imperial survival and promoted moral suasion campaigns across the peninsula.51 The GGK centralized the organizations and programs of “social education” under a network called rengōkai (the federation) established in 1935.52 At the village level, the Rural Revitalization Campaign and new hamlet organizations created conditions in which rural youth began to see new opportunity.

50 Zenshō Einosuke’s research results include Chōsen no kei (1926), Chōsen no jinkō genshō (1927), Chōsen no saigai (1928), Chōsen no hanzai to kankyō (1928), Chōsen no sei (1934), three massive volumes of Chōsen no shūraku (1933-1935), all published as research material (chōsa shiryō) by Chōsen sōtokufu. His studies still serve as the most comprehensive study of Korean villages in prewar years. The focus on Korean customs and traditions by these researchers coincided with a growing appreciation of Korean folk art and culture by Japanese cultural critics. Yanagi Muneyoshi pioneered this field in the 1910s and 1920s, establishing a Korean folk art museum in 1924. Both of these series of rural research and the folk art movement developed in close relation and rivalry with Korea’s cultural nationalism. This stimulated the academic study of colonial ethnography in Japan, of the sort characterized today as “Orientalist” in tone. Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 7-37. 51 Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku shakai kyōiku-ka, Chōsen shakai kyōka yōran (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1937) in Ilche ha chŏnsi ch'ejegi chŏngch'aek saryo ch'ongsŏ 47: hwangguk sinminhwa ch’ǒngch’aek 18, ed. Minjok munje yŏn'guso (Kyŏnggi-do Koyang-si: Han'guk haksul chŏngbo, 2000), 29-30. 52 Ibid., 162-163.

#264 A version of the Rural Youth Industry emerged in the Korean countryside once the colonial government came to rely heavily on village youth.

The Rural Revitalization Campaign became an emblem of GGK’s administration. In an article in their journal Chōsen, the officials situated the campaign within the increasing international tensions:

The full development of Korea, which is filled with potential, will be a great contribution to the empire toward the goals of securing its glorious position and continuing to expand in the face of the difficult international situation. If the empire’s authority stays firm and rock-steady, the peace of East Asia will be maintained, and the uncertainties of the world will be naturally lessened. Pursuing this grave international mission of the empire requires the energetic industry of Korea and the souls of 20 million well-trained masses. Indeed, it has to be, “light comes from Korea.” This is the 53 !international basis of the Rural Revitalization Campaign. Defined in such grand language, this campaign did indeed mobilize the population on an unprecedented scale, much as occurred in the agrarian campaigns in Japan. Triggered by imperial expansion and rural depression, the moral suasion programs mobilized the core of hamlet communities for the first time. Officials conducted studies on the economies of households and regulated daily life through social organizations. By 1934, 7,861 hamlets established associations called shinkōkai (or chinhŭnghoe in Korean: revitalization groups), which also organized subgroups for women and (male) youth. By mobilizing traditional hamlets, the GGK expected the shinkōkai to mobilize farm communities more efficiently. As in Japan, the campaign in Korea assumed that Japanese nationalism coupled with Ninomiya Sontoku agrarianism would make people more productive and “self-reliant.”

53 “Nōsan gyoson shinkō undō no zenbō,” Chōsen 224 (January 1934): 17.

#265 This hardwork-ism appeared everywhere in articles of Jiriki kōsei ihō (Self Revitalization

News; 1933-1941), an official newsletter of the campaign published by the GGK. In addition to farming methods and techniques, the belief in efficient use of resources, time, and labor constituted the core of the message.54 This was also the moment in which the colonial government announced that the countryside, not the cities, was the champion of assimilation effort. Governor-General Ugaki complained that cities “tend to lag far behind farm and fishing villages in promoting national spirit and self-reliance.”55 Comments like this sought to foster a divided identity between urban and rural leaders and shake the supremacy of urban intellectuals and culture.

The campaign in Korea was not merely a transplant of the earlier Japanese rural programs like the Local Improvement Movement after the Russo-Japanese War, but reflected the contemporary conditions of the 1930s. According to the scholar Gi-wook Shin, the middle-class peasants initiated tenant protests in the mid-1920s to secure tenancy rights.56 After the depression struck, the price of rice in 1931 fell to only 39% of what it had been in 1925, driving many owner-cultivators into tenancy. Tenant disputes became smaller in scale, more focused on their

54 “Nōsan gyoson shinkō undō no zenbō,” and “ Nōsan gyoson shinkō keikaku no jisshi gaikyō,” Chōsen 224 (January 1934), 4-111. See also Kim Yǒng-hǔi, Ilche sidae nongch’on t’ongje, 73-86. 55 Ugaki Kazushige, Chōsen o kataru (Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1935), 132-134, in Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 331. 56 Gi-wook Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 54-68. 57 Ibid., 68-73. A newspaper reported that there were more than 3,000 disputes in nine months, the average of 20 a day, in 1935. “Ch’ungnam-do sojak chǒngǔi 9-gewolgan 3-ch’ǒn kwon,” Chosǒn chungang ilbo November 9, 1935 (evening edition).

#266 basic survival, more frequent, and more widespread.57 The Tonga ilbo described the rural devastation as “a starving hell.”58

The predicament of the rural population had been a topic of discussion for GGK officials for a long time.59 In the early 1920s, they conducted detailed research on the practice of tenancy around the peninsula and adopted some legal measures to mitigate landlord-tenant tensions.

South Ch’ungch’ŏng province published a report on tenant practices in 1930, confirming once again the problems that had been well-documented since the 1910s, such as the slave-like relationship between tenants and their landlords and the exploitation of tenants by the Korean middlemen who worked for the landlords to the extent that they were called “government- general of the countryside” and “evil demons.”60 The GGK set up official arbiters in provinces and enacted a tenancy law in 1933, before a similar law was enacted in Japan, in an attempt to guarantee long-term, stable tenancy for Korean farmers. Scholar Pak Sŏp argues that these measures formed the basis of the Rural Revitalization Campaign because GGK officials believed that unstable tenancy prevented farmers from improving cultivation.61

The associations, shinkōkai, also preceded the Rural Revitalization Campaign. Ohara

Shinzō, a Japanese bureaucrat and governor of South Ch’ungch’ŏng, advocated shinkōkai groups

58 Tonga ilbo, March 24, 1932, quoted in Gi-wook Shin, , Peasant Protest and Social Change, 69. 59 As early as 1913, Governor-General Terauchi issued a decree on the protection of small farmers to promote owner-cultivators against the vested interests of Japanese settlers; see Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 125. 60 Chūsei-nandō, 1930-nen chōsa kosaku kankō chōsa 2 (Konju: Chūsei-nandō, 1931), 324-329. 61 Paku Sopu [Pak Sŏp], 1930-nendai Chōsen ni okeru nōgyō to nōson shakai (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1995), 177-211. He argues that the GGK could enact the tenancy law in 1933 before Japan did because the Korean tenancy customs were extremely unfair to tenants, the absence of legislative bodies allowed the government to easily ignore the pressure from landlords, and some Korean landlords supported the law to rescue fellow Koreans. Paku, 200-201.

#267 in 1916—around the same time that Xinzhu Governor Mimura Sanpei attempted to build youth groups in Taiwan. Ohara transformed the kye into groups to promote the reform of old customs, modernization of agricultural production, moral training, public hygiene, and so on.62 He also tried to introduce the agrarian ideology of Ninomiya Sontoku to the Korean countryside. Ohara visited yangban families, proffering government policies in the form of a written prayer at

Confucian shrines to gain support from powerful local elites. His attempt at rural reform soon slowed, but in 1920, another governor, Tokizane Akiho, again advocated the establishment of hamlet shinkōkai. By 1923, the provincial government was boasting about the rapid development of shinkōkai, saying that the number of shinkōkai groups increased from 761 (67,482 members) to 1,415 (104,345 members) between 1917 and 1922.63 Under the supervision of provincial, county, and village officials, these groups put out a long and detailed list of daily life rules, such as, do not forget to clean the toilets, save some money every month and one-third of supplementary incomes, return borrowed things as quickly as possible, shoo sparrows away when you walk along rice paddies, and the like.64 The list resembles what kyōka (moral suasion) groups advocated in villages of Xinzhu in Taiwan around the same time, and shows that shinkōkai were already promoting moral suasion a decade before the Rural Revitalization

Campaign began.

Kwangsŏk had one of the most famous groups in Korea, the Kalsan shinkōkai. It was honored with an award 14 times for its activities between 1918 and 1930 and was introduced in

62 Ohara Shinzō, “Chihō shinkōkai no sōsetsu,” in Chōsen tōchi no kaiko to hihan, ed. Kida Chūei (Seoul: Chōsen shinbunsha, 1936), 55-58. 63 “Chūsei-nandō ni okeru shinkōkai,” Chōsen 101 (September 1923): 117. 64 “Chūsei-nandō shinkōkai no kokoroe sono-ichi,” Chōsen 82 (December 1921): 103; “Chūsei-nandō shinkōkai no kokoroe sono-ni,” Chōsen 83 (January 1922): 26.

#268 journal and newspaper articles. Kalsan hamlet differed from the rest of Kwangsŏk in that

Japanese companies owned most of its land. The large presence of Japanese companies transformed the hamlet community and gave rise to Korean middlemen [malŭm] as new local leaders. Kalsan’s middlemen, Pang Chong-ku and O Yi-sŏn, established a community reform group in 1915, which was renamed a shinkōkai when Governor Ohara issued his decree in 1916.

They created a new kye to regulate customs and finances for funerals, established a private school for children, banned alcohol, and offered free guidance on new agricultural methods.

Kalsan was highly regarded because neither Pang nor O exploited the tenants—a behavior widespread among the majority of middlemen in similar positions. Reportedly, they even re- distributed land among small tenants at their own loss.65

Although Kalsan became nationally famous, its model of development clashed with the plan of the GGK. The Rural Revitalization Campaign aimed at reviving the old hamlet communities under the control of government offices. However, in Kalsan, Pang and O represented a new class of leaders rather than traditional landlords, and did not rely much on government authorities, either. More traditional in the sense of landlord leadership, Yun Hŭi-jung also established a shinkōkai, but combined it with the progressive reform [hyǒksin] movement, promoting both socialist and governmental goals at the same time. “The first and critical task of our society is to reform women’s society,” he argued and established a shinkōkai specifically for female villagers.66 Despite the leftist aspects of the group, its leader, Cho Dong-sun, was recognized as a “model shinkōkai leader” by colonial officials in 1929.

65 Kin Yikkan [Kim Yik-han], Shokuminchiki Chōsen ni okeru chihō taisei no kōchiku katei to nōson shakai hendō, (Ph.D. diss., University of Tokyo, 1995), 125-129. 66 “Kwangsŏk-myŏn chinhŭnghoe palchǒn,” Chosǒn ilbo, December 8, 1923, 4; “Yumanghan chinhŭnghoe,” Chosǒn ilbo, January 27, 1923, 4.

#269 Although government officials offered funding and set up county- and provincial-level associations, halmet shinkōkai groups functioned mainly as private groups for local notables. As obvious in Kwangsǒk’s examples, only locally-grounded leaders had the ability to form shinkōkai in the hamlets.67 Many of them were established before the government-endorsed programs. While staying clear of the nationalist and socialist movements prevalent in urban areas, these rural notables eagerly absorbed both the resources of colonial authorities and the inspiration for modernization derived from nationalist and socialist activism in the 1920s. Their choice was not “either-or” between colonial and anti-colonial positions, but rather whether they could adapt to the given conditions and maintain their sphere of influence and social statuses.

A Generational Shift in Rural Villages

Relying on local notables and their hamlet shinkōkai did not enable the GGK to reach the broader rural population. In Japan’s nation-building, the key to mass mobilization rested in the creation of “pillars of youth” in the countryside. As of 1932, the colonial government recognized that many Korean youth groups were still too “left-leaning” to implement its plan of total mobilization of Korean youth.68 In the same year, the GGK notified the provincial governors of

“the basic principle” of youth group guidance: “the fundamental mission of youth groups is to improve personal character and increase physical strength through the power of mutual moral training [shūyō] of youth.”69

The government established two programs for young men in the countryside between the late 1920s and 1930s: the guidance of elementary school graduates [sotsugyōsei shidō] and the

67 Chūsei-nandō, “Chūnan ni okeru shinkōkai,” Chōsen 173 (October 1929): 233. 68 “Seinen dantai no sōdōin miawase,” Osaka Asahi shinbun furoku Chōsen Asahi, August 16, 1932. 69 “Kokumin jiriki kōsei no aki sekkyokuteki ni seinendan yūdō,” Keijō nippō, September 10, 1932.

#270 revitalization youth groups [shinkō seinendan] under shinkōkai supervision. In 1935, 12,736 became model graduates,70 and in 1938, 156,761 Korean youth became members of 3,056 shinkō seinendan.71 If these numbers of participants reflected reality, these programs easily surpassed the reach of nationalist and socialist youth groups that had grown “like bamboo sprouts” in the early 1920s. This was because the target population of the new governmental programs was not the most privileged elite youth, but elementary school graduates. Although still limited in scope to young men who could afford elementary education, these groups under the Rural

Revitalization Campaign began to form a version of the Rural Youth Industry which provided social mobility to elementary school graduates.

The story of Kim Yŏng-han, a villager born in Kwangsǒk’s Ch’ŏndong hamlet, shows the ways in which a youth’s life evolved around the Rural Revitalization Campaign. Although he was not wealthy enough to pursue education beyond elementary school, Kim Yŏng-han came from a relatively prominent family. His great grandfather had been a lower-rank bureaucrat

[muban] who took a position of a village head in 1900, and his grandfather was a sǒdang teacher.72 Although most of their land was lost in the grandfather’s generation, Kim Yŏng-han’s father attended the Usin School. Its modern-style education gave its graduates an opportunity to enter new occupations such as schoolteachers and village officials. But because his brother-in- law was an imprisoned independence activist, Kim Yǒng-han’s father was blocked from obtaining an official job and instead worked at exchange markets in port towns. Born in 1920,

70 Tomita Akiko, “Nōson shinkō undoka no chūken jinbutsu no yōsei,” Chōsenshi kenkyūkai ronbunshū 18 (March 1981): 158. 71 Ibid.; Keijō Nipponsha, Shōwa 15-nendo Chosen nenkan (Seoul: Keijō Nipponsha, 1940), 600-601. 72 Kwangsǒk did not exist as an administrative village until 1914, so Kim’s great grandfather was a head of a smaller “village” [myǒn] newly implemented in 1900.

#271 Kim Yŏng-han faced the combined pressure of financial difficulty and a proud family lineage. In

1928, he entered the Usin School as his father had done before him. When the school became a public elementary school the following year, he passed the exam to become a second-grader.

Since the Kwangsŏk elementary school had only a four-year program, he entered into the fifth grade of the Nonsan elementary school in 1932 and commuted three miles everyday until he graduated two years later.

Kim received his first official title when he finished the four-year program as one of the two model graduates of the elementary school. The model graduate program reflected the changing focus of education starting in 1924 from academic knowledge toward agricultural training.73 Schools first established vocational (or agricultural) programs to teach farming techniques and the use of new fertilizers.74 The guidance of graduates began in ten schools (102 graduates) in Kyŏnggi province in 1927 as a pilot program. With the success of its expansion to

41 schools and 900 graduates, the other provinces adopted similar programs between 1930 and

1932.75 Kim Yŏng-han belonged to the first generation of model graduates in South

Ch’ungch’ŏng province.

As a model graduate, Kim became a walking advertisement for the Revitalization

Campaign. He had to attend ceremonies as a new “pillar” of the village. “It was quite

73 O Sǒng-ch’ǒl, Singminji ch'odŭng kyoyuk ŭi hyŏngsŏng (Seoul: Kyoyuk kwahaksa, 2000), 297-310. This coincided with the debate on educating “locality” and practical skill in Japan proper. Advocates for agricultural training often positioned themselves against the nationalists’ movement to establish a university. It was more “democratic” education than higher education, they argued, and “if the state was going to spend a massive amount of money [for university education], we feel that it should be spent for lower-level [education].” Hayashibara Norisada, “Chōsen ni okeru kyōiku gyōsei mondai 1,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (June 1925): 25. 74 Toyota Shigekazu, “Jikka kyōiku ni tsuite,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (December 1925): 38-58 gives a list of programs that a number of schools initiated in 1924. 75 For more on the graduate guidance program, see Tomita, “, “Nōson shinkō undoka no chūken jinbutsu”; Yi Ki- hun, “Ilche ha nongch’on pot’ong hakkyo ŭi ‘ch’olŏpseng chido,’” Yŏksa munje yŏn’gu 4 (April 2000): 269-306; Yahiro Ikuo, “Sotsugyōsei shidō to nōson shinkō saku 2” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (June 1932): 27.

#272 troublesome because every time the school had an event, they called up model graduates,” he recalled, “no matter how busy you are, you cannot not go.” He also remembered that “there were many benefits as well.” One of them was easy access to fertilizer and livestock.76 The model graduate program encouraged new agricultural methods characterized by the heavy use of fertilizer.77 With these techniques and knowledge, the model graduates were supposed to challenge the advantage of wealthier farmers, including Japanese, and raise the morale of average Korean farmers.78

The model graduate guidance was the first step in creating “pillars of youth” in the Rural

Revitalization Campaign, and colonial bureaucrat Masuda Shūsaku called it an outstanding program unique to Korea.79 This guidance, of course, emphasized moral training in addition to productivity and scientific farming. Yahiro Ikuo, a leading bureaucrat in Korean rural social work, summarized the purpose of the graduate guidance: “to foster good farmers, good villagers, useful people, and people who contribute to the village.” The greatest importance was placed on the spirit of hard work. “Never spare a moment but work” was the core principle.80 In the ideal scenario, the young graduates would transmit their high morale to their families and communities. Yahiro argued that these graduates had already had a great impact:

[Among the model graduates’ families] there are many that fell into financial difficulties because the fathers did not work diligently and wasted money. Once a model graduate made a serious effort to restore the family business and showed good results, his father

76 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda, 20-24. 77 Tomita, “Nōson shinkō undoka no chūken jinbutsu,” 161; see Gi-wook Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change for the general trend of farming in Korea. 78 Masuda Shūsaku, “Chōsen ni okeru buraku chūshin jinbutsu ni tsuite no ichi kōsatsu” Chōsen 257 (November 1936): 93-96. 79 Ibid., 102. 80 Yahiro Ikuo, “Sotsugyōsei shidō to nōson shinkō saku 1,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (May1932): 27-28.

#273 began to work together with him. So did his mother and younger siblings, leading the entire family to hard work. In another family, even a blind brother was led to operate a rope-weaving machine and make straw storage bags with his wife… In many places, graduates teach writing and math to uneducated children in the neighborhood in night classes. Others teach how to make compost. This is a spark of the youth’s resolution to 81 !do something [for their communities]. The program marked a new phase in which rural youth gained the opportunity to subvert one particularly stubborn sort of social hierarchy—one based on age. Japanese bureaucrats repeatedly noted that the rigid age and class hierarchies of the yangban families remained unchanged in the villages. “It is truly not an easy thing for young people around 20 years old to stand above older leaders to lead the hamlet,” Masuda argued as late as 1936.82 A governmental report argued that because Korean society “despise[d] young people,” youth organizations had been hampered in their development.83 The graduate guidance program was therefore designed to

“recruit those who share a same age-cohort feeling.”84 Kim Yŏng-han remembered that, as a model graduate, he did receive unusual respect from villagers. Although he also said that the

“model graduates did not have the power to guide others,” as the Japanese bureaucrats claimed they should, the experience planted in him an identity as a leader of a new generation.85 Yet, the program did not touch the class hierarchy and may even have helped to reinforce it, since most model graduates came from relatively well-off farming families.86 The schooling rate for Korean

81 Yahiro Ikuo, “Sotsugyōsei shidō to nōson shinkō saku 2,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (June 1932): 28-30. 82 Masuda, “Chōsen ni okeru buraku chūshin jinbutsu,” 91-92. 83 Yun Chang-ǒp, Jissenjō kara mita seinendan soshiki to keiei (Seoul: Seinendansha, 1939), 7-8. The other two factors are customs of early marriage, and the lack of development of shrines. 84 Tomita, “Nōson shinkō undoka no chūken jinbutsu,” 162. 85 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda, 23. An Interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011. 86 Tomita, “Nōson shinkō undoka no chūken jinbutsu,” 159-164.

#274 male children in the countryside in South Ch’ungch’ŏng remained as low as 30 % in the early

1930s, and 80% of the villagers were illiterate in both Korean and Japanese.87 Graduates in rural villages were thus not the average farmers, but a newly emerging “middling class”—those who could attend an elementary program, but were not wealthy enough to pursue higher education in the city and a position in colonial bureaucracy.88

Being more privileged than average farmers, these model graduates hoped to pursue an educational career more than the GGK had anticipated. Kim Yŏng-han wanted to obtain more education in an engineering school in Japan. He went to a couple of private schools to prepare for the standardized exam while working part time as an agricultural instructor affiliated with the village office. In the local Yungjŏng School, village youth preparing for various exams taught one another without a teacher. Kim used mail-order lectures from the middle-school program of

Waseda University in Tokyo, like Xu Chongfa in Taiwan. He tested his progress by sending his answers to the sample exams to the Japanese journal, Shikenkai (The Exam World), which then mailed him back his score.89

Regardless of his aspirations to leave the village, Kim’s profile as a local leader expanded when he joined the shinkō seinendan. While preparing for the exam and working as an agricultural instructor, he was selected to be a member of the shinkō seinendan at the age of 16.

Kim Yŏng-han explained that every village shinkōkai chose about 20 out of 100 youth and

87 Among 9,116 villagers, 7,289 could not read either Korean or Japanese according to the 1930 census (South Ch’ungch’ŏng), 46. 88 The national average of the schooling rate of school-aged children in the early 1930s was barely 20% (male: 28-30%, female: 7-8%). In cities, it was more than 50% (male: 70%, female: 23-31%). Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu- kyoku, Chōsenjin gakurei jidō shūgaku no jōkyō (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1935). See also O, Singminji ch'odŭng kyoyuk, 133. 89 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda, 16-20.

#275 formed shinkōkai seinendan to promote the custom reform and agricultural improvement. A

Korean schoolteacher became the leader of the Kwangsŏk shinkō seinendan, and its members experimented with modern agricultural techniques in the school-owned collective farms.90 They also helped large landholders in farming to make collective savings. Like the model graduates, the shinkō seinendan members were given preference in the land re-distribution sponsored by the

GGK to create owner-cultivators and in livestock loan programs. Despite the similarity of these activities to those of Japanese seinendan of the 1900s and 1910s, Kim Yǒng-han described the agriculture-centered shinkō seinendan in Korea as quite different from the Japanese seinendan, which had adopted military training early on. In our interviews, he corrected me repeatedly when

I omitted the word “shinkō” in front of “seinendan.”91

In his memory, the shinkō seinendan occupied a leadership position in village affairs and offered him a higher status than the model graduate program had done. Membership of shinkō seinendan was restricted to those widely recognized as accomplished farm youth. They wore new uniforms and caps, increasing their sense of being part of a select few. Kim recalled,

“wearing the uniform made us feel very different. People whispered, ‘he is a model youth.’”

Members regularly provided “hamlet guidance,” explaining current affairs and war situations to the villagers, most of whom were illiterate. Another responsibility of shinkō seinendan members was teaching farming techniques to female villagers. Women were rarely involved in agricultural production before the Revitalization Campaign, and many villagers remembered this change as

90 Ibid., 24-25. 91 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011.

#276 one of the most revolutionary aspects of the period.92 After two years of work in the village shinkō seinendan, Kim Yŏng-han found a job in Taejŏn, but because he was also a former model graduate, he returned to the village frequently to help out in seinendan activities.93

Improving the status of young people without disrupting the local order was a prerequisite for the success of the Rural Revitalization Campaign. Local officials recognized that, while enforcing new life styles and work ethics, younger generations might meet opposition from older, traditional forces. When they were re-organizing hamlet shinkōkai groups, they tried to include both generations in leadership positions to mitigate the tension. Organizing youth in a separate group was one way to increase the space for youthful leadership without directly confronting the older generation.94 In Kwangsǒk, the shinkō seinendan developed without disrupting the order around the powerful landlords. Kim Yǒng-han recalled, “there was no opposition to the seinendan’s activities. Our work—mostly instruction in agriculture—did not evoke any resistance.”95 Defining the role of the shinkō seinendan within the agricultural production campaign helped to raise the status of youth without creating generational conflict.

As in the Japanese and Taiwanese villages, the elementary school and schoolteachers were the center of both the rural campaign and youth organizations in Korea. But the function of the elementary school and the composition of student body differed. Compared to the 1930s in

92 Kim Yǒng-han remembers that the main feature of kyōrei kumiai groups, which the government specified as the most closely supervised groups in the Rural Revitalization Campaign, was encouraging women to engage in agriculture. Shinkō seinendan youth were their instructors. Based on the interviews. For kyōrei kumiai, see Chūsei- nandō, Shinkō no Chūnan (Taejǒn: Chūsei-nandō, 1935): 85-127. 93 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27, 2011. 94 The degree of generational conflict varied from village to village, and generally speaking, clan-based communities [tongsŏng burak] tended to have more cooperation than confrontation, scholar Kim Yǒng-hŭi argues. Kim Yǒng-hǔi, Ilche sidae nongch’on t’ongje, 476-479. 95 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011.

#277 Taiwan and the 1910s in Japan, the schooling rate in Korean villages remained low.96 Students of the elementary school already cleared the hurdle of devoting the cost and time to education.

Graduates naturally cultivated their cohort identity as young leaders in the village, enhanced by the model graduate program and shinkō seinendan activities.

In the Rural Revitalization Campaign, colonial officials tried to raise schooling rate and expected schoolteachers to influence the entire community. “Teachers go around to the model graduates’ homes in their leisure time—after finishing work on weekdays and on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Even on boiling hot or severely cold days, they show up, get a plow, and take some compost to work together with the model youth. In fact, they do not ‘guide’ them but ‘work together,’” as the official Yahiro Ikuo explained the “grave mission” of teachers.97 An official in Kyŏnggi province, Cho Wŏn-hwan, argued that rural seinendan should develop based on the trust between teachers and students. “Only schools can serve as the source of youth guidance,” he argued, “youth guidance is about unconditionally influencing the youth through the virtue and feeling of the teachers.”98 Thus, in the 1930s, the responsibility of teachers extended far beyond teaching in the school curriculum. In some cases, “social education” was emphasized more than the school curriculum. In the mid-1930s, when the GGK started to support shortened elementary courses, consisting of one teacher offering two years of literacy, math, and vocational education in remote hamlets, local officials described the appropriate attitude of the teachers—“You have to be ready to be a father, not only a teacher, to children

96 In official statistics, the national average of elementary school enrollment was 17.3% (male: 28%, female: 6.2%) in 1930 and 23.4% (male: 36.7%, female: 9.8%) in 1935. O, Singminji ch'odŭng kyoyuk, 133. 97 Yahiro Ikuo, “Sotsugyōsei shidō to nōson shinkō saku 2,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (June 1932): 31. 98 Cho Wŏn-hwan, “Seinen shidō ni tsuite,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (April 1934): 39.

#278 from underprivileged families,” and “your entire family should be ready to be teachers to the whole hamlet.”99 Teachers were considered almost like religious missionaries of assimilation during the Rural Revitalization Campaign.

The Post-1920 Generation

Horizontal networks already existed among village youth in labor-sharing associations

(ture) before Japanese rule. In a way, the colonial rural programs attempted artificially to reestablish old ture groups among graduates of the elementary school under colonial supervision.

At the same time, the generation of Kim Yŏng-han represented a new type of villager who grew up in a different social environment. These young people were born after the March First

Movement of 1919 and had no first-hand memory of youth politics, socialist mobilization, or governmental crackdowns in the towns during the 1920s. For them, colonial rule was an established fact and Japanese settlers were their neighbors. Their future prospects depended on how well they managed within the existing system.

For this generation, the Japanese were no longer a monolithic colonial ruler—or the

“Other,” as perceived by anti-colonial intellectuals of the 1920s—but a group with a variety of characteristics. In Kwangsŏk, Kim Yŏng-han developed amicable relationships with Japanese residents. He remembered that they had shared community life with Korean farmers, organizing seasonal festivals together, for example. “The rent charged by the Japanese landlords and the

Oriental Development Company was half what the Korean landlords charged,” he repeatedly claimed. Overall, “the Japanese lived well with us,” he recalled.100 This seems in stark contrast to

99 Chūsei-nandō, Chūsei-nandō kyōiku yōkō (Taejǒn: Chūsei-nandō, 1937), 442-447. 100 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011.

#279 the confrontation of Koreans and Japanese in the early 1900s and during and after the March

First Movement. His interactions with the Japanese as a “pillar of youth” and local official allowed him to observe the dynamics in the Japanese community: “They still labeled themselves as ‘former-samurai’ class or ‘new citizens’ (former outcasts),” he remembered, and “those from

Tokyo were arrogant,” often making fun of those from Okinawa.101 His observations of Japanese residents were sensitive to class, origin, occupation, and personal traits rather than casting a categorical image of colonial ruler.

In fact, class became a larger source of frustration for Kim, and ethnicity (and race) became a subordinate category to class. Kim Yǒng-han was not only a part of the post-1920 generation, who were the protagonists of rural youth mobilization of the 1930s, but also in the new “middling class.” They were better off than average farmers, but begrudged the line between themselves and those who could pursue higher education toward a bureaucratic career. Kim

Yŏng-han’s situation was typical of sons of formerly wealthy but declining families. As the first son, he was under pressure to recover the family name and financially support the household. For many like him, the crackdown on nationalist and socialist activists—mostly college-educated elite—in the 1920s opened space for upward mobility. From his perspective, the Kwangju

Student Movement between 1929 and 1931 seemed to belong to a different class because most of the activist youth came from the upper strata. Once they were blacklisted, their family members and relatives were blocked from official positions in the same way that Kim Yŏng-han’s father

101 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang-ǔl salda, 119.

#280 had been.102 With the harsh colonial crackdown and the youth training programs that started in the 1930s, class hierarchy was shuffled, providing new opportunities to rural youth of his background.

Overcoming class differences was a goal of other villagers as well. In the course of the

1930s, average male villagers competed to join this newly emerging “middling class.” Many families sought elementary school education despite the financial burden. The schooling rate expanded especially in the average-to-lower strata of farmers. Between 1922 and 1932 in South

Chǒlla, for example, the schooling rate of owner-tenants increased from 1.5% to 38.8%, and that of tenant farmers increased from 1.8% to 22.3%, while that of land-holding farmers remained the same (68% for landlords, 45% for owner-cultivators). Scholar Kim Puja argues that the boost in the national schooling rate in the 1930s—from 30% to 47.4% between 1930 and 1937—came from the “schooling fever” of average-to-lower farmers in the countryside and it continued until the end of the war.103

The identity of model rural youth, separate from that of activist youth, was also shaped by the limits on information from Seoul and other cities to the countryside. In Kwangsŏk, only the school and hamlet heads subscribed to one national newspaper (Asahi shinbun) and one local

(Chūsen nippō), and most villagers did not read them. Kim Yŏng-han did not even know that there were other newspapers like Tonga ilbo and Maeil sinpo until he was in the fifth-grade and

102 Many of the arrested youth were put into reformatory programs that forced their ideological conversion (tenkō). As of 1935, the government reported that out of 1,353 thought criminals in South Ch’ungch’ŏng, 781 were “converts” and another 118 were in the process of being converted. In Nonsan country, 155 people (85 Japanese and 70 Koreans) were designated as “thought reformers” in 1930 to facilitate conversion. Some of these youth could recover their upper mobility only after their conversion. Kōtō hōin kenjikyoku shisōbu, “Chūsei-nandōka no shisō gaikyō narabi dōkō: Ronsan, Fuyo, Seiyō, Reizan oyobi Karatsu-gun kaku shisō zendō kikan no katsudō jōkyō,” Shisō ihō 9 (December 1936): 13-50. 103 Kim Puja, Shokuminchiki Chōsen no kyōiku to jendā (Kanagawa: Seori shobō), 115-138. See 163-271 on the situation for women’s schooling.

#281 the names appeared in a school play. The shinkō seinendan were an important source of information, from which he learned about such things as the achievements of Korean athletes in the 1936 Olympics, news he relayed to other villagers through hamlet guidance. Apart from this,

Kim had to depend on relatives in Seoul to send his family newspapers. He particularly liked reading serialized novels in these papers, but he did not know any nationally-famous authors, including Yi Kwang-su.104 The limited exposure to news sources isolated these youth not only from anti-colonial activism, but also from developing a sense of belonging to a wider colonial network of rural youth. South Ch’ungchǒng province published monthly newsletters, Kinnan geppō (Kinnan Monthly) from 1925 and Chūnan shinkō geppō (South Ch’ungch’ǒng

Revitalization Monthly) from 1934 to encourage moral suasion programs in rural villages.105 But these publications did not create a shared discursive sphere in the same way that seinendan newsletters did in Japan.

Nonetheless, this generation of this middling class suited the GGK’s policy of social re- organization and the new emphasis on the “pillars of youth.” The colonial official Masuda

Shūsaku divided central village figures into two groups: the older, wealthier, well-established leaders, and the “pillars of youth” from ordinary families. He warned that since the family reputation and age hierarchy formed the heart of local leadership, youth should not try to take the place of older leaders. However, his article emphasized the way to create pillars of youth through youth programs. In fact, the Rural Revitalization Campaign gradually turned middling-class farming youth into leading figures in village affairs. In the 1928 governmental list of central

104 He remembers that literary magazine Sanch’ŏlli (三千里) was relatively popular among young villagers. Those who understood Korean Hangŭl often read the novels in the magazine for those who could not. 105 Chūsei-nandō, Chūsei-nandō kyōiku yōkō, 649-650.

#282 figures in the shinkōkai, almost all were government officials or the landlord classes. In contrast, in the 1936 list, these strata were represented by only 29%.106 There was a conscious effort on the part of both the GGK and the youth themselves to shift the leadership role from traditional leaders to younger, less wealthy, farmers.

Conclusion

Through elementary schools, the model graduate program, and the shinkō seinendan,

Kim Yǒng-han’s aspiration for local reputation, access to education, and job opportunities at the local office grew. Kim represented a new generation and a new middling class that regarded these colonial institutions as advantageous, rather than as a threat to their ethnic identity or social status in the way intellectual activists had in the 1920s.

The “model rural youth” were limited by the low rate of schooling and literacy in Korea.

The competition to get into elementary school was fierce among average villagers despite the

GGK’s policy to expand elementary schools especially after they recognized that elementary school was a window for social opportunities. In South Ch’ungchǒng, schools could accommodate only 60,000 students out of 190,000 school-aged children in 1936. The newspaper

Chosǒn chung’ang ilbo argued that the remaining children were in “an illiteracy hell.”107

Graduates thought of themselves as a select group and pursued further education opportunities outside their home villages. Kim Yǒng-han’s story reveals that the lack of information flow between cities and the countryside prevented a common identity from developing across villages.

The two leading Korean-language newspapers of the time, Tonga ilbo and Chosǔn ilbo, were

106 Paku Sopu, 1930-nendai Chōsen, 163-165. 107 “Ch’ungnam-do hallyǒng adong sipkuman ch’on-yǒmyǒng!” Chosǒn chungang ilbo, February 22, 1936 (evening edition), 1.

#283 unknown even to Kim, who was an eager reader and an ambitious young man. This made villages more isolated in Korea than in Taiwan or Japan.

At the same time, much like young men in rural societies in other parts of the Japanese empire, a particular class of the post-1920 generation aligned their interests with colonial programs. In Miyagi, rural youth generated a collective identity and found job opportunities in youth training institutions, creating the “Rural Youth Industry.” In Taiwan, relatively well-off elementary school graduates viewed the seinendan beneficial to obtain office jobs in the mid-1930s. After 1937, the ladder of youth training institutions created its own version of a Rural

Youth Industry for average agrarian youth. In Korea, although it was available only to a limited number, young men like Kim Yǒng-han began to view themselves as local leaders and associated youth programs with social mobility in the early 1930s. The psychology of these youth, including their aspirations for educational success, desire for financial opportunity, feelings of marginalization, pride as select youth, and envy of urban students, led to the making of the

“model rural youth”—the central force of assimilation in the eyes of GGK officials, or the

“pillars” of Japan’s nation-empire. !

#284 ! ! ! ! ! Chapter 8: The Mobilization of Korean Rural Youth for Total War (1930s-1945) !

In the 1932 Rural Revitalization Campaign, the Government-General in Korea (GGK) began recruiting the younger population in the countryside for grassroots “kyōka” (moral suasion). A specific group of rural youth—those born after 1920 who graduated from elementary school—responded to the GGK’s strategy with a degree of enthusiasm since it provided new social opportunities. As a result, some Korean villages witnessed a change in the generational power relationship, even if small and slow, and a rise in the status of young men. The model youth had an authoritative voice when they relayed national news to illiterate villagers, and

“revolutionized” women’s role when they taught agricultural methods to women. In the mid-to- late 1930s, colonial authorities continued establishing youth training institutions to create ideal

Japanese subjects in the Korea countryside, reflecting the acceleration of nation-empire building.

As in other parts of the Japanese empire, the presence of the military and war in particular brought a major shift in the value of young male bodies. Since the agrarian ethos preached by the GGK always included a martial aspect, the slogans and methods of training for rural youth in the early 1930s did not suddenly alter when the Japanese empire entered the phase of total war in 1937. The alliance between colonial authorities and the “model youth” in the countryside culminated in the volunteer soldier program, which was celebrated as the most

#285 prestigious achievement for male rural youth. The prestige of volunteer soldier guaranteed access to salaried jobs and respect from villagers. But because the war demanded total mobilization of the Korean population, the expansive scale of youth recruitment diminished the prestige of

“model rural youth.” Just as military conscription in Taiwan had a different effect from the volunteer soldier program, the universal character of youth mobilization at the height of Asia-

Pacific War drove ambitious young men away from their alliance with colonial authorities.

Instead they used their ability to find loopholes in the colonial system in order to maintain a sense of control over their own destinies. The location of the Korean peninsula, lying between the Japanese metropole and Manchuria, “the lifeline of the empire,” made Koreans more vulnerable to changes in the war situation than the Taiwanese. In the early 1940s, when Xu

Chongfa and Huang Yuanxing in Taiwan reached the top of the ladder of youth training institutions, Kim Yǒng-han moved from cooperation with the state to a maneuver to escape labor conscription. This manifested the demise of the Rural Youth Industry, the mechanism that had linked mobilization and empowerment of youth.

Recently, scholars such as Takashi Fujitani and Brandon Palmer have detailed the recruitment of Korean soldiers, the experiences of Korean youth in the Japanese military, the literary and cinematic propaganda, and state programs that forcibly integrated the Korean population into the wartime empire.1 Here the perspective is inverted from the state to the recruits and what these changes meant to their life decisions. The focus remains on the social sphere during the mobilization for total war.

1 Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) and Brandon Palmer, Fighting for The Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937-1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).

#286 The Merging Militaristic and Agrarian Youth Training

The shinkōkai (revitalization groups) under the Rural Revitalization Campaign were assigned an intermediary role between the GGK and hamlet society in the early 1930s. They carried the message of Japanese agrarianism and re-organized agricultural labor at the household level. As in Japan, agrarianism and militarism were twinned from the start. More similar to Japan than to Taiwan, the influence of the military was visible in the daily life of Korean village youth.

The central mission of the shinkō seinendan was to train youth for agrarian leadership under the banner of the Rural Revitalization Campaign. But military recruitment occupied an important place in designing the membership and activities. The membership had a strict age limit of 20 “because the officials assumed that members would join the military afterwards,”

Kim Yǒng-han recalled.2 He also considered that “the shinkō seinendan cultivated loyalty to the state” in preparation for war mobilization.3 Whether that was true or not, many of shinkō seinendan members and model graduates of elementary schools became volunteer soldiers once the colonial government began recruiting them in 1938.

Although training at the village level was largely focused on agricultural production, at the county and provincial levels, the shinkō seinendan conducted military drills. Once a year, village seinendan gathered in the country capital, Nonsan, for a week to practice drills. At the province-level, an army officer who usually taught middle school students offered “group training” in provincial cities, Kongju and Kapsa.4 These training camps gave youth contact with

2 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011. 3 Ibid. 4 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda: chibang hengjǒng 1930-yǒndae esǒ 1950-yǒndae kkaji (Kyǒnggi- do, Kwach’ang-si: Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, 2006), 24-25. An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011.

#287 other shinkō seinendan members. The instructors gave prizes based on their performances, raising a sense of rivalry between groups or counties. But these camps were too short to nurture a collective identity as “rural youth” or “South Ch’ungch’ŏng youth” unlike the symbolic “Xinzhu youth” in Taiwan.

Throughout the empire, agrarian and military disciplines developed in sync. But owing to the life-long passion of Governor-General Ugaki Kazushige (1931-1936), the GGK promoted the fusion of agrarian and military values more deliberately than in Taiwan. A protégé of Yamagata

Aritomo and Tanaka Giichi, Ugaki firmly believed in the role of the army in leading the masses

to achieve national goals. In 1925, for example, he expressed in his diary:

Party politics is like a three-cornered battle and interrupts the flow of events. Only one party can hold power at any time. Thus, the work of leading our seventy million fellow citizens under the throne as a truly unified and cooperating nation in both war and peace, however you think about it, has been assigned to the army. The navy has but limited contact with the populace. Only the army, which touches 200,000 active soldiers, 3,000,000 reserve association members, 500,000 to 600,000 middle school students, and 5 !800,000 youths, has the qualifications to accomplish this task. Following his own words, Ugaki established youth training centers [seinen kunrenjo] in 1926 when he was the Army Minister. During his tenure as Governor-General of Korea, he initiated the Rural Revitalization Campaign, the elementary school model graduate guidance, and the shinkō seinendan for the goal of simultaneously promoting agrarian and military values.

Besides these two main youth programs, the GGK and provincial governments promoted a number of training institutions specifically targeting young men in the countryside. Starting in

1931, the GGK organized the All Korea Local Pillars of Youth Training Session for seven to ten

5 Ugaki Kazushige, Ugaki Kazushige nikki I (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1968), 497-498, in A Social Basis For Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community, Richard Smethurst (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), the front cover.

#288 days every year.6 In 1933, Kyŏnggi province established the first agricultural training center in

Korea.7 In South Ch’ungchŏng, an institution for rural female youth preceded that for male youth by two months. In the Rural Women’s Training Center, founded in April 1934 in Yusŏng, for nine months 30 women between 17 and 22 years of age who had the elementary school degree learned the basics of agriculture, sericulture, apiculture, stockbreeding, and housekeeping techniques.8 The Rural Youth Training Center in Yusŏng for male youth trained a larger group,

60 men between 20 and 30 years of age, also for nine months.9 It adopted the popular camp training advocated by the Japanese shūyōdan (The Moral Training Group), dividing the trainees into twelve households consisting of five family members, and forming two mock hamlets with six households each. Through this self-rule exercise, youth were supposed to learn methods of collective farming, agricultural renovation, effective financing, and a disciplined farmer’s life.10

Within two years, South Ch’ŭngch’ŏng built two more rural youth training centers in Sŏch’ŏn and Yesan to train 30 young men each.11

The main focus of the training in these institutions was to spread agronomic knowledge and nurture agrarian patriotism. The Yusǒng Rural Youth Training Center stated that it would by

6 Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku shakai kyōiku-ka, Chōsen shakai kyōiku yōran (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1937), 99-100. 7 “Chōsen ni hajimete no nōji kunrenjo,” Chōsen 219 (August 1933), 140. 8 Furushō Itsuo, “Chūsei-nandō nōson joshi kōshūjo wo shisatsu shite,” Jiriki kōsei ihō 19 (March 1935): 7; “Chihōchō kōbun,” Chōsen sōtokufu kanpō 2195 (May 8, 1934). 9 Later became 11 months. Yi Tae-gyu, “Chūnan yūryō nōsan shisatsu shokan ni” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (January 1938): 144. Officially the age range was set between 18 and 25, but the head of the Yusōng center only recruited those between 20 and 30 years of age. Kobayashi Rinzō, “Jujō nōson seinen kunrenjo o miru,” Chōsen nōkaihō 5 (May 1936): 63. 10 Furushō Itsuo, “Chūsei-nandō nōson seinen kunrenjo o shisatsu shite,” Jiriki kōsei ihō 18 (February 1935): 5-6; “Chihōchō kōbun,” Chōsen sōtokufu kanpō 2238 (June 19, 1934). 11 “Chihōchō kōbun,” Chōsen sōtokufu kanpō 2690 (January 4, 1936); “Chihōchō kōbun,” Chōsen sōtokufu kanpō 2797 (May 13, 1936). These centers also offered two-month training for elementary school graduates.

#289 no means turn into a school, but would remain as a “training dojo”12 to teach the “Way of

Imperial Farmers.”13 The trainees started each day at four a.m. with a prayer for the prosperity of the nation ruled by the Emperor.14 These institutions hung Ugaki Kazushige’s famous slogan

“shinden kaihatsu” (“spiritual field cultivation,” a pun on the “virgin field cultivation” policy of the Tokugawa era), which stressed the mastering of Japanese spirit. According to Ugaki, success in agricultural production had to accompany moral training through rituals at Shinto shrines and an embrace of religious faith, as well as learning the virtues of frugality and hard work.15

The emphasis on the spiritual education of rural youth through these institutions seamlessly continued into the wartime mobilization after 1937. In September 1937, 241 participants of the All Korea Pillars of Youth Convention gathered at the Chōsen Shrine to pray for the Japanese army’s success. The convention consisted of a number of lectures on rural youth’s responsibility in the time of war.16 Policymakers advocated establishing more “farmers dojo” [nōmin dōjō] because “farmers are the foundation of the nation and the source of people’s fresh blood.” Referring to German and Italian policies of dispatching urban youth to work in rural cultivation, an official of South Kyǒngsang province Ōno Kenichi equated the strength of rural youth with that of national defense. Ōno cited General Ishiwara Kanji, saying that “the basis of the military rests in the rural village, and the rural problem centers on the issue of morality,” highlighting the importance of moral education of rural youth.17

12 Kobayashi Rinzō, “Jujō nōson seinen kunrenjo o miru,” Chōsen nōkaihō 5 (May 1936): 62. 13 Shinozaki Denzaburō, “Busshin ichigen, shinshin ichijo,” Chōsen 251 (April 1936): 2-7. 14 Ibid. 15 Yi Pam-ik, “Chūnan no shinden kaihatsu undō,” Chōsen 252 (May 1936): 77-86. 16 “Jikyoku ni saikaishi zen-Sen chūken seinen taikai kaisai saru,” Jiriki kōsei ihō 49 (October 1937): 43. 17 Ōno Kenichi, “Kokumin no kunren to soshikika ni kansuru hiken” Bunkyō no Chōsen (March 1938): 36-54.

#290 Career-Pursuing Rural Youth

Did these youth training institutions in Korea affect young people’s lives as powerfully as those in Taiwan? In the Xinzhu youth training center, the trainees developed strong emotional ties with the instructors, based on which they cultivated a firm identity as “Xinzhu youth,” as well as “uneducated rural youth,” when they interacted with their counterparts from other regions. Young men in Xinzhu also considered the ladder of youth training programs as a path for new job opportunities. In these programs, they learned to embrace and voice Japanese nationalism both as a faith and a means that allowed them to compete effectively with urban youth. Some of these characteristics can be seen in the Korean youth institutions as well. For instance, there was a similar ladder of youth training institutions—from the graduate guidance to the shinkō seinendan, and then to the rural youth training center. In order to attend the rural youth training centers, youth had to be model members of village shinkō seinendan and be recommended by provincial governors.18

Unfortunately, there are few accounts of what Korean youth experienced and how they felt in the training centers of South Ch’ungchŏng or anywhere else. The Japanese instructors claimed to develop emotional ties with the Korean trainees. The head of the training center in

Yusŏng stated, “it is my principle that, as an instructor, my attitude toward trainees is based on sincerity and a warm heart as well as a relationship resembling fathers and sons.”19 Their training periods were significantly longer (nine months) than that in Xinzhu (30 days). Theoretically, the

Korean trainees could develop warm, personal ties with one another and with the instructors.

18 An Interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27, 2011. 19 Shinozaki Denzaburō, “Busshin ichigen, shinshin ichijo,” Chōsen 251 (April 1936): 7.

#291 Even if they had formed a personal bond, an identity as “uneducated rural youth” probably did not develop or provide an incentive to embrace Japanese nationalism to overcome feelings of inferiority. One main reason for this was that these trainees were relatively well- educated youth. Just as model graduates and shinkō seinendan members came from a pool of relatively well-off families in the village, the trainees in the rural youth training centers were a new “middling class.” Even in 1938, the shinkō seinendan represented the “intellectual” class in many villages.20 The training centers for rural young women, in particular, were regarded as upper-class institutions. They required an elementary school diploma—rare among Korean women in the countryside.21 “[The Rural Women’s Training Center] was the fashion center of the village. These women, with the clicking of their high heels on the way to classes, appeared beautiful to me as a child,” one witness recalled.22 After graduation from these institutions, most men took job positions of village secretaries.23 Although these youth were supposed to become agricultural leaders in the village, because of the persistence of a strict age hierarchy, “no matter how much they spoke, the older villagers did not listen to them,” Kim Yǒng-han recalled. These youth found a better career path in clerical positions in local administration.24 As a result, the

Korean young men who had climbed up the ladder of youth training did not have interactions with those from other parts of the peninsula. After their training at rural training centers, unlike the Taiwanese graduates who went on to the national Patriotic Volunteer Labor Corps Program,

20 “Waga dō no kinrō hōshi undō, Zenra nandō,” Chōsen 282 (November 1938): 38. 21 Furushō Itsuo, “Chūsei-nandō nōson joshi kōshūjo o shisatsu shite,” Jiriki kōsei ihō 19 (March 1935), 7. 22 Yuasa Katsuei “Rupotāju onshō no shujusō,” Chōsen gyōsei 232 (February 1942): 14. 23 Kim Yǒng-han, who later supervised human resources of local offices, recalls that “so many talented people went to rural youth training centers and became myǒn secretaries,” from an interview with Kim in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011. 24 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda, 88.

#292 they returned to the village and stayed there. Without much direct competition against their urban counterparts, the trainees retained a stable identity as new local “elites” in their villages.

These men did not criticize urban youth as morally inferior, but envied their educational opportunities. “For seinendan members, graduates of middle schools and other higher education were the object of admiration,” Kim Yǒng-han remembered, “but it was unimaginable to go to middle school when graduating from elementary school was already so difficult.”25 Despite the hurdle, Korean youth could hardly abandon the hope of educational advancement, which was the most common path for urban, wealthy youth.

This was counter to Ugaki and Japanese instructors who deemphasized careers based on higher education. Yet the state and ambitious youth continued to share an interest in creating (or being) the model rural youth. Kim Yǒng-han maintained a strong desire to pursue education, and when this was not feasible, his career path was set in local administration. At each step, his association with the model graduate guidance program and the shinkō seinendan served him as an asset. Kim found himself under increasing financial pressure after his father’s death in 1939.

To support eleven members of the household, he first worked in a filature factory in Taejŏn. After a few months, when a Japanese official in the county office found out that Kim was a former

“model youth,” he referred Kim to a Japanese coal retail company, Mikuni shōkai, where he nearly quadrupled his salary. Kim Yǒng-han began to use a Japanese name before the official policy of name change was implemented. He picked Kanayama as his surname because his relatives in Japan had been already using it, and the storeowner Nakashima Tōchi gave him the

25 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27, 2011. Kim also told me a story of his friend who went to an agricultural school. When he graduated, he waved the diploma and shouted, “This is (worth) 2000-yen!” to mean the tuition his family paid for five years. This shows that school diplomas and family wealth were directly connected.

#293 first name, Eiichi, after the famous Japanese industrialist, Shibusawa Eiichi. Kim quit the store after two years because he wanted to take the exam for entering an engineer school in Osaka. In the meantime, the Nonsan county administrative office hired him and persuaded him to postpone going to Japan and continue working for the office. “I really wanted to start studying since I was already 21,” he said while showing me the school brochures that he requested from Japan. But his mother fell ill, and the war against the US started soon afterwards. Kim Yŏng-han realized,

“there was no way I could go to Japan any more.”26

Becoming a village secretary was the most popular route for ambitious young men in the countryside in the early 1930s. In the course of the decade, elementary school graduates outnumbered those of middle schools (or equivalent) in posts of village and town administration.

By 1937, 86% were either elementary school or sŏdang (private schools) graduates.27 Kim Yǒng- han also tried to become a village secretary right after his schooling, but had to wait until he would reach the age of 20 based on the regulation. A large number of village officials came from families with financial difficulties but prominent backgrounds like Kim. “To recover the lost status of the family” was a common pressure for them.28

These youth were extremely eager to pursue higher positions and further education. They studied mail-order lectures from Japanese universities, discussed different types of standard examinations, and often submitted opinions to the journal Chōsen chihō gyōsei (Korean Local

Administration) instead of sharing essays and poems with village youth like their Taiwanese and

26 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27, 2011. 27 Matsumoto Takenori, Chōsen nōson no shokuminchi kindai keiken (Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha, 2005), 105. 28 Matsumoto finds examples in the journal Chōsen chihō gyōsei. Matsumoto, Chōsen nōson, 106-109. Another source of the youth’s psychology is a 1930 diary written by O Chŏn-bok residing in Hwasun county, South Cholla. He could not finish the upper-level elementary program and came back to his village. He worked as a farmer but gradually became depressed. His life turned upward when he eventually got a job in the myŏn administrative office.

#294 Japanese counterparts. Perhaps because of their desire for upward mobility, the turnover of these posts was high, reaching 20% in the year 1937 alone.29 At every turn in his life, Kim Yǒng-han looked into multiple career options. At one point, he considered becoming a police officer because, although the salary was lower than village office positions, police officers appeared powerful in local affairs. As it turned out, the background check and physical examination were too strict for both Kim and his father. He investigated the elaborate requirements to become a teacher. Unlike Taiwan, in Korea the youth training institutions did not mean selective treatment for entry into a teaching career. It was nearly impossible for those without middle or normal school training to meet the requirement of passing exams in sixteen subjects in three years.30

Kim was also keen on career paths available for middle school students. Becoming a military officer trainee, for example, was “such an accomplishment” for them.31 Later, when there were more kyōka training institutions for local officials and teachers in the 1940s, Kim recognized them mainly as a tool for promotion.32 This career-oriented attitude among people of this class and generation led them to see the shinkō seinendan and rural youth training centers as an attractive route to success. But their primary aspiration was entering a school in the city or Japan.

Thriving in a Rural Youth Industry was not the only, or the most desirable, option for them.

Through their pursuit for educational and career development, many Korean rural youth adopted the rhetoric of Japanese agrarian nationalism in public and private writings. In the Korea

29 Matsumoto, Chōsen nōson, 104. Because the examination to become a myǒn secretary was that of qualification, not for specific posts, the successful examinees could freely transfer among difference offices too. An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011. 30 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23, 2011. 31 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27. 2011. 32 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on February 13, 2012.

#295 Local Administration, young villages officials expressed a love for their home villages, showing their determination to “remain in a periphery and devote myself to agricultural development,”

“bring benefits and happiness to the village,” and “be ready to bury my body here.”33 The diary of O Chǒn-bok, a young man who grudgingly became a farmer in South Chǒlla after quitting an upper-level elementary program, shows his embrace of Japanese agrarian teachings. While waiting to be hired by the village administration, he repeatedly reminded himself of the sanctity of hard work to overcome his everyday misery.34 The popular ideas about love for one’s place and a dedication to agriculture influenced these youth one way or another. They derived pride from the fact that they had overcome adversity by studying hard, echoing the typical story of

Meiji Japan’s “risshin shusse” (“rising in the world”).35 But many appeared to believe that they deserved better, and their expressed determination “to remain in the village” often had a tone of self-sacrifice rather than the embrace of a dream occupation.

Although they did not share an identity as the “uneducated,” their generational identity as

“youth” seems to have grown significantly over the course of the 1930s. In the same way that the youth groups in county capitals in the 1920s was a disguise of generational power politics, one could observe a generational divide in village administration in the early 1930s: village advisors consisting of the old landlord class on the one side and an increasing number of young village secretaries on the other.36 The young generation struggled to expand their power. They used the

33 Excerpts from Chōsen chihō gyōsei in Matsumoto, 122. 34 Hong Sǒng-ch’an, “Ilcheha kohallyok ‘silǒp’ ch’ǒngnyǒn ǔi nongch’onsenghwal kwa ch’eje p’yǒnip,” Han’guk kyǒngje hakpo 12:1 (Spring 2005): 382. 35 Matsumoto, Chōsen nōson, 119. 36 Nakamura Kosei, “Taigen shōgen: men shokuin ni seinenkai o mōkeyo,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (February 1930): 78.

#296 journal the Korea Local Administration to affirm their generational identity and assert the superiority of youth by advocating, “set up a youth group of village officials!” and “hire secretaries directly from model youth of the village” because the youth could bridge the administration and villagers much more effectively.37 While age hierarchy remained the principle of the village social system, the position of village secretary—and access to journals like the

Korea Local Administration—provided these youth with more confidence than was possessed by the model graduate guidance or shinkō seinendan.

Centralizing the Village Seinendan

During the Rural Revitalization Campaign put forth by Governor-General Ugaki, youth training programs to inculcate agrarian ideals and patriotism spread and offered a ladder of social mobility to a new “middling class” of rural youth. This route of career development did not give these youth much occasion to compete against those from outside their village, county, or province. Although they used slogans and rhetoric of Japanese agrarian nationalism, their social environment was too isolated to feel responsible for the future of the empire at large. In Miyagi, the village seinendan played a central role in providing its members with a sense of direct connection to the empire. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, GGK officials established a central association of seinendan in order to strengthen a similarly direct tie between seinendan members and the imperial state.

In 1937, GGK Ministries of Education, Agriculture, Police, and Home repeatedly issued notices to provincial governors to expand seinendan institutions, transferring the affiliation from the shinkōkai to country and provincial administrative offices. The start of the all-out war against

37 Ibid.; Shin Pok-kyun “Taigen shōgen: men shoki wa sono men jūmin taru mohan seinen o motte menchō yori suisen seshime saiyō subeshi,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (August 1930): 113.

#297 China added a sense of urgency to these notices: “Since the Northern China Incident… the gravity of the mission of the seinendan increased day by day… The seinendan is the most powerful organization to respond to national crises and conduct disciplined activities to meet social duties. Particularly in Korea, when reflecting upon the surrounding situation, this is felt even more deeply.”38 These notices emphasized the shared destiny of Japan and Korea in the war.

At the same time, colonial officials hesitated to recruit all village youth because the seinendan had developed based on their exclusive, “elite” character. They still recommended that the range of the membership be limited to “those with solid principles among graduates of public elementary schools”39 and continued to expand elementary schools in the meantime.

The gatherings of the centralized seinendan association were thoroughly militaristic, aiming at the transformation of young farmers into national soldiers. The inauguration ceremony of the Chōsen Seinendan Federation was held on September 24, 1938. More than 4,000 seinendan members in their khaki uniforms marched and sang the Japanese anthem as well as

Umi Yukaba, a song about preparing to die for one’s lord sung by Japanese and Taiwanese youth of the same period. They recited the “Oath As Subjects of the Imperial Nation” [kōkoku shinmin no seishi], prayed at the Chōsen Shrine, and gave three shouts of banzai (long live) to celebrate the solidarity of 150,000 Korean youth. They also visited the brand-new volunteer soldier training center and met the first Korean recruits. One member from North Kyŏngsang expressed his flush of emotion when he exchanged words with the volunteer soldier trainees.

[When I heard their words,] so many emotions overwhelmed my heart, and I could only shed tears. We could not help but pray for their advancement and cry out from the

38 “Seinendan no kyōka fukyū,” Chōsen 268 (September 1937): 153-154. 39 “Seinendan no fukyū narabi ni shidō ni kansuru ken,” Chōsen shakai jigyō (May 1936): 68-70.

#298 bottom of our hearts, “Volunteer soldiers! Please represent the youth of the peninsula and pursue the mission of an imperial subject.” I also deeply understood the degree of 40 !seriousness the authorities are giving to the seinendan movement. The names of two European fascist nations often appeared to support this centralization effort. The news on German and Italian youth activities provoked a sense of a global youth network. North Kyǒngsang provincial seinendan associations, for example, announced that they adopted the German Arbeitsdienst (labor service) as a “groundbreaking” program to train Korean youth.41 The new German phrase gave a fresh image to the old slogan of “hardwork-ism” despite that, in reality, volunteer labor programs had been widely practiced in the shinkō seinendan all over the peninsula and in other parts of the Japanese empire.42 A gathering of the Chōsen

Seinendan Federation in April 1939 reminded a newspaper reporter of “the flourish of the Fascist group led by Mussolini, as well as the endeavor of young national heroes who contributed to our nation’s [Meiji] Restoration.” The article continued by arguing that “our Japanese seinendan is based on the Yamato spirit and is a unique organization which should be separated from the

Italian Black Shirts, but there is no difference in the purpose of nurturing solid thoughts.”43

The militaristic character was even more central in another major institution promoted by the GGK, youth training centers [seinen kurenjo]. It was the same institution initiated by Ugaki in Japan in 1926 that coexisted or merged with agricultural training programs in rural Japan.

Youth training centers (separate from the “rural” youth training centers in Korea, which were

40 “Akibare ni iki takarakani taikai narabi ni hatsudanshiki o ageta Keihoku rengō, Chōsen rengō seinendan ni sanka shite,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (November 1938): 54-58. 41 “Seinendan shidō hōshin ni shin seishin o orikomu,” Chōsen nippō, March 12, 1938. 42 After 1938, these volunteer labor groups were called the Patriotic Labor Corps (kinrō hōkokutai) organized at various levels of seinendan associations. It does not seem that their activities were as centralized as the Taiwanese volunteer labor corps. 43 “Rengō seinendan no funki,” Chōsen mainichi shinbun, April 9, 1939.

#299 established by provincial governments) were introduced to Korea in 1927 to allow Japanese reservist associations to provide military training privately to Japanese settler youth.44 In 1929, the GGK started building youth training centers as attachments to elementary schools. Although these centers focused on Japanese youth residing in Korea, a portion (one-third to one-seventh) of the trainees were Korean men.45 The total number of youth training centers remained low

(around 50-60) in the first half of the 1930s, but in 1938, the GGK planned to rapidly expand them. The youth training center became “the only institution” to prepare a large number of

Korean youth, who did not have conscription duty, for war.46 The GGK had built more than

2,000 centers by the end of the war,47 and since 1940, every elementary school was supposed to have one youth training center attached to it.48 Its purpose was also re-written to target Korean youth:

The purpose of the youth training center is to provide the working youth who did not continue into upper school after elementary school and who are engaging in some occupation with teaching and training during time between their work in order to enhance their quality as imperial subjects, share their occupational skills, as well as conduct basic military training, and increase the defensive ability of the nation. On this 49 !point, it is the same as the youth school [seinen gakkō] in Japan. The emphasis on localities as the flip-side of centralization, widely seen in Japanese and

Taiwanese wartime mobilization, became a trend in 1930s Korea as well. The compilation of

44 “Seinen kunrenjo no nintei ni tsuite” Bunkyō no Chōsen (December 1928): 8-9. 45 See Chōsen nenkan, 1933: 551-552, 1934: 410, 1938: 591, 1941: 558, and 1942: 460-461. 46 Chōsen sōtokufu, Chōsen sōtokufu jikyoku taisaku chōsakai shimonan sankōsho: Nai-Sen ittai no kyōka tettei ni kansuru ken (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, September 1938), 26. 47 The speed of expansion exceeded the original plan of 140 additional centers a year. ibid, 26-28. Chōsen sōtokufu jōhō-ka, Chōsen jijō shiryō dai-4 gō: Rensei suru Chōsen (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1944), 9. 48 Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku shakai kyōiku-ka, Chōsen shakai kyōiku yōran (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1941), 39-41. 49 Chōsen sōtokufu jōhō-ka, Rensei suru Chōsen, 8.

#300 local histories and chronicles by schools and provincial governments became a widespread phenomenon around this time. Writings on South Ch’ungch’ǒng province often emphasized the tie between the ancient kingdom Paekche and Japan. Ugaki’s successor, Minami Jirō, argued that

Paekche’s princes came to Japan and became top-rank bureaucrats in the Asuka period

(592-710), and Japanese generals served the Paekche kingdom. He presented these exchanges as the foundation of “Nai-Sen ittai” (“Japan-Korea Unified Body”).50 The locality of South

Ch’ungch’ǒng, often provoked in youth training in the province, was mobilized as part of Japan’s empire-wide nation-building.

The centralization of the seinendan, the expansion of youth training centers, and the local chronicles all aimed at nurturing an identity as Japanese national-imperial subjects. In turn, the youth expanded their presence in imperial affairs through these institutions. As the Government-

General and the Japanese army increased their dependence on youthful manpower, they engaged

Korean youth with a hope to control them through a strategy of co-optation. Youth themselves were well aware of the combination of risk and opportunities of wartime mobilization. The negotiation between the state and youth was most clearly exhibited in the volunteer soldier program.

The Elite Volunteer Soldier Program

The Korean Special Volunteer Soldier System was introduced in February 1938, three years earlier than in Taiwan. In the first year of recruitment, 2,946 Korean youths applied for 400 open slots, and both the numbers of applicants and slots increased to 303,394 and 6,300

50 “NaiSen ittai wa kudara no mukashi ni kaere,” Keijō nippō, June 4, 1938, 1.

#301 respectively (in a ratio of 48:1) in 1943.51 Although the ratio did not rise as high as that in

Taiwan, many Korean applicants, either voluntarily or forced, submitted applications signed in blood as well. In August 1944, the volunteer soldier program was absorbed into the conscription system and the first group of Korean conscripts entered the Japanese Army in December 1944.52

The introduction of military service in Korea arose more from the need for youth education and governance of the wider population than from a shortage of military manpower.53

In 1932, coinciding with the start of the Rural Revitalization Campaign, the Chōsengun, the standing army in Korea and a part of the Japanese army, considered the future possibility of soldier recruitment in Korea.54 The army did not expect any significant boost in combat capacity through this program. In fact, the number of slots the Chōsengun initially prepared was too small

—400 in 1938 and 600 in 1939—to be considered a serious expansion. Opinions Concerning the

Korean Volunteer System, a 35-page report submitted to the Ministry of Army in Tokyo by top

Chōsengun officials in June 1937, also stated that “it is absurd opportunism to regard the volunteer program as a sheer means to increase manpower.”55 Instead, the primary goal was the socialization effect of training select Korean youth in the Japanese army, as both Ugaki

51 Naimu-shō, Taiheiyō Senka no Chōsen oyobi Taiwan (1944), in Miyata Setsuko, Chōsen minshū to “kōminka” seisaku, (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1985), 62. 52 Palmer, Fighting for The Enemy, 89. 53 Miyata Setsuko, Chōsen minshū, 50-56; Palmer, Fighting for The Enemy, 44-47. The shortage of military manpower was more closely felt after 1942, when Japan faced increasingly severe battles. 54 Chōsengun sanbōchō, “Chōsenjin shiganhei mondai ni kansuru ken kaitō,” (Seoul: Chōsengun, November 1937), 236. http://www.koreanhistory.or.kr/eng/index.jsp Accessed on October 2, 2013. Ugaki directly expressed his desire to introduce Korean military service, telling that “Koreans should start serving in the military as soon as possible” in 1934. Ugaki Kazushige, Ugaki Kazushige nikki II (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1970), 981-982. As early as 1927, when he requested to build the standing Army in Korea and when he temporarily served as a deputy Government-General in Korea, Ugaki already considered the need for a conscription system among Koreans. Ugaki Kazushige, Ugaki nikki (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1954), 11. 55 Chōsengun shireibu, “Chōsenjin shiganhei seido ni kansuru iken” (Seoul: Chōsengun shireibu, June 1937), 255. http://www.koreanhistory.or.kr/eng/index.jsp Accessed on October 2, 2013.

#302 Kazushige and Minami Jirō had believed since much earlier in their careers. These young men were expected to enhance the morale of society and propel further Japanization of the population, or in other words, provide a strong push for moral suasion [kyōka] campaigns.

Another Chōsengun report showed its confidence in the role that the Korean volunteer soldiers would play in their home villages:

Including Koreans in the army and making them directly experience and foster the imperial spirit will not only train and develop the volunteers’ own spirit, but will also have a tremendous impact on society after they are discharged and start to play the role 56 !of the chūken (pillars) of Korean youth back their home. The timing of introducing military service appeared optimal to officials of the GGK with the start of the Sino-Japanese War.57 After all, Japanese officials had to be cautious in handing weapons to Korean youth, who had shown more active anti-colonial movements than their

Taiwanese counterparts—they had not forgotten the March First Movement two decades earlier or the Kwangju Student Movement more recently. The GGK and the Chōsengun carefully assessed the reactions of the Korean people to the new war situation. On the one hand, many

Korean intellectuals had been demanding that the GGK open a path for military service for

Korean youth and, subsequently, universal suffrage for the Korean population.58 On the other hand, there were “those who consider that the Japanese would strip them of their rights and exploit them as cannon fodder on the battlefield.”59 Colonial officials had to fend off both reactions to attain the best ideological effect and produce loyal Japanized citizens ready for total

56 Chōsengun sanbōchō, “Chōsenjin shiganhei mondai” 242. 57 Takashi Fujitani also argues that military officers and GGK officials claimed that since 1931 “the Korean people had become increasingly patriotic in their attitudes toward Japan.” Fujitani, Race for Empire, 42. 58 See Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese settler colonialism in Korea 1876- 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 319 59 Chōsengun shireibu, , “Chōsenjin shiganhei seido,” 262-3.

#303 mobilization. At the same time, some of the demonstrations that demanded military service struck colonial officials as sincere and real. The colonial police department reported about a meeting attended by 33 renowned Korean intellectuals in Seoul in November 1937 to organize a celebration for the introduction of military service. The report claims that they argued,

“considering the international situation in East Asia, Koreans would remain an inferior race in

East Asia if they missed this opportunity to stand up and serve in the military as Japanese citizens.”60 Although the police and Chōsengun decided to disallow the celebration event,

“looking at the way they began the meeting with the Oath as Subjects of the Imperial Nation and

‘Long Live the Emperor,’ as well as the sincere attitude of the presenters, the atmosphere of the place seemed more serious than any time before.”61 The optimistic and celebratory tone prevailed as the empire entered the war, which provided a favorable environment for initiating the militarization of Korean youth.

As primarily an institution of moral suasion, the volunteer soldier program also adopted dojo-style training. Through six months of group living, the select trainees went through a rigid schedule from 5:30 a.m. to 9:45 p.m.62 They prayed for the Emperor, cited the Oath as Imperial

Subjects, and sang Umi Yukaba. They had three or four hours of training time in every morning and afternoon, which consisted of spiritual lectures, academic subjects such as history and economics, military drills, and volunteer (construction) labor. They finished each day with seiza formal sitting to “reflect upon the training of the day at the center and pray for the happiness of

60 Chōsen sōtokufu keimu-kyoku, Dai-73 kai Chōsen sōtokufu teikokugikai setsumei shiryō I (1937; repr., Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1994), 292. 61 Ibid., 293. 62 It was shortened to four months in 1941.

#304 parents at home.” The center advocated “comprehensive lifestyle guidance,” which viewed even mealtime as an opportunity for acquiring Japanese mannerism (“do not make noise while eating,” “do not waste a drop or a grain of food”), understanding hygiene (“wash your hands,”

“chew thirty times every time”), and gaining scientific knowledge (of nutrition, digestion, and parasites), as well as to think about larger national issues (agricultural renovation, knowledge of fertilizer, national food security), and so on.63 As such, physical training was only a small part of the trainees’ daily life. The main focus was to instill a solid identity as Japanese subjects by living an idealized Japanese regimen.

Like the graduates of other youth training institutions, the ex-volunteer soldiers were expected to play a leadership role in village society. In August 1939, provincial governments set up “promotion corps” [suishintai], formed by the discharged volunteer soldiers, graduates of the volunteer training center who had not served in the army, and youth who went to other youth training institutions. They received special treatment as local leaders and the emblem on their shirts symbolized their elite status in the countryside. By November 1940, 1,500 young men worked in promotion corps to facilitate wartime mobilization. Many of these youth also became the heads of patriotic units [aikokuhan] that tied each household to the mass mobilization machine throughout Korea.64

At the same time, the volunteer soldier enjoyed unparalleled prestige and obtained a clearly different status in the minds of Korean youth. Despite that the “volunteer fever” based

63 Their daily routines are elaborated in: “Chōsen shiganhei kurenjo sankanki” Chōsen no kyōiku kenkyū 121 (October 1938): 69-91. Kuramoto Hiroshi, “Senbō no mato kunrenjo seito no ichinichi (shōzen),” Chōsen 284 (January 1939): 88-99. 64 The famous aikokuhan was similar to Japanese “tonarigumi” in enforcing collective responsibility to each unit of around ten households in tax payment, volunteer labor, etc. Kim Yǒng-hǔi, Ilche sidae nongch’on t’ongje chǒngch’aek yǒngu (Seoul: Kyǒngin munhwasa, 2002), 234-242.

#305 itself on many applicants who were more or less coerced to apply, once selected as volunteer soldiers, they were treated as national heroes.65 It was by far the most admirable achievement for rural youth to attain, to the extent that every time Kim Yŏng-han mentioned anything about the volunteer soldier program in interviews, he could not help but repeat that the “volunteer soldiers boasted of their status so much!”66 Newspapers devoted entire front pages and more to reporting the inauguration of the volunteer soldier training center, calling it “a historic first step” and “an epoch-making event in the history of rule of Korea.”67 Such propaganda deployed by the GGK and Korean intellectuals alike contributed to the renown of the volunteer program and directed nation-wide attention to the select trainees. Most of the trainees received cash from the “special volunteer soldiers support associations” and wealthy notables in their home counties. One trainee was reportedly sent off at the train station by a crowd of more than 4,000 people, and another received more than 800 yen.68

The establishment of the volunteer soldier program and the nationalization of the seinendan and youth training centers were closely linked to each other. The majority of the volunteer soldiers were from the agricultural sector and graduated from six-year elementary schools. This pool of youth overlapped with members of the seinendan.69 The GGK called the seinendan the “central force” of national mobilization that would make the volunteer soldier

65 The government estimated that only one-third of all applicants “truly volunteered.” Chōsen sōtokufu, Dai-79 kai Teikoku gikai setsumei shiryō (December 1941), 104 in Palmer, Fighting for The Enemy, 77. See Palmer, 74-83 on the coercive nature of the “volunteerism.” 66 Interviews with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23 and 27, 2011 and February 13 and 29, 2012. 67 “Wakaki hantōjin senshi nihyaku-yomei rekishiteki dai-ippo o fumu,” Keijō nippō, June 16, 1938 (evening edition), 1; “Shiganhei kunrenjo no kaishoshiki ni atarite,” Chōsen nippō, June 15, 1938, in Chōsen tsūshin 145 no. 3635 (June 16, 1938): 1. 68 “Chōsen shiganhei kurenjo sankanki” Chōsen no kyōiku kenkyū 121 (October 1938): 78-79. 69 Ibid., 72-73.

#306 program and universal education possible.70 Applicants to the volunteer program were also encouraged to go to youth training centers beforehand because the training at the volunteer soldier training center was “like its review.”71 The seinendan also took advantage of the prestige of the volunteer program in order to attract public attention. It was not a coincidence that the inauguration of the Chōsen Seinendan Federation took place only three months after the nation- wide celebration of the volunteer soldiers training center, where the seinendan members had an arranged meeting with the brand-new volunteer soldier trainees.

Through these institutions, the GGK aligned closely with male youth of Korea. “The old leaders long grounded in the Chinese classics are deeply affected by the thought that ‘soldiers should be despised.’ They could not understand the volunteer soldier program,” Governor-

General Minami Jirō commented.72 Emphasizing the generational divide, the GGK attempted to establish a direct tie with Korean rural youth. Resembling the ways in which being “young” was translated into a superior status in the wartime Taiwanese and Japanese countryside, the masculine body of the volunteer soldier was taken to symbolize a dramatic change in status for young men in the Korean countryside.

Unique in the reception of the Korean volunteer soldier program, however, was youth seeing it in the context of their aspiration for educational achievement. From the beginning, flashes of academic prestige associated with the program inspired the trainees. The first group of trainees stayed on the campus of Imperial University of Keijō, the only national university in

Korea, for three months until the training center’s facility was completed. The instructors noticed

70 “Hantō minshū no shidōteki tachiba to kokka jigyō no tantōteki chii!” Keijō nippō, January 30, 1938. 71 Kuramoto Hiroshi, “Shigansha kunrenjo hōmonki,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (December 1938): 44. 72 “NaiSen ittai wa Kudara no mukashi ni kaere,” Keijō nippō, June 4, 1938, 1.

#307 that the trainees were awed by the academic setting and felt deeply proud of this experience.73

Many of the trainees planned to continue schooling, especially in the military establishment, after their service. In an interview, the trainees expressed that “[as for the prospect after the service], I am not sure about the situation yet, but would like to go to the upper school in the army,” and “many of us want to go to military officers’ school in Tokyo or other army-related schools.”74 Chosǒn ilbo reported that some of them, indeed, were admitted to the army’s engineering school.75

The trainees’ aspiration for school-based careers was not what the GGK originally intended. Colonial officials had expected to recruit youth from upper-class and educated families and turn them into pillars in their local areas because they were the ones who had demanded military service in Korea.76 The result was the opposite. They ended up recruiting mostly rural agrarian youth and turning them into more school-seeking youth. The GGK accommodated and took advantage of the desire of these ambitious young men from the countryside, but did not hide their contempt for the wealthy class:

From the fact that sons of those with high status, academic degrees, or wealth are extremely few [among applicants] shows that Korea still has the tendency to look down upon military service. People of the wealthy and leading classes enthusiastically welcomed the proclamation of the [volunteer soldier] program. But when it comes to volunteering, do they not commit a contradiction by recommending others but not 77 allowing! their own sons [to apply]?

73 “Chōsen shiganhei kurenjo sankanki” Chōsen no kyōiku kenkyū 121 (October 1938): 86. 74 Kuramoto Hiroshi, “Shigansha kunrenjo hōmonki,” Chōsen chihō gyōsei (December 1938): 44. 75 “Chiwonbyŏng Yi-kun: Yukkun konggwa e hapgyok” Chosǒn ilbo, December 19, 1939, 2, for example. 76 Palmer, Fighting for The Enemy, 44-45. 77 Kaida Kaname “Shiganhei seido no genjō to shōrai eno tenbō,” Konnichi no Chōsen mondai kōza 3 (Seoul: Ryokki renmei, 1939): 27-28.

#308 The disappointment in upper-class youth only increased the value of rural elementary school graduates. Comparing them with most middle school graduates who did not even apply, an editor of Maeil sinpo argued that, “I express respect for the pure patriotism of elementary school graduates” who rushed to apply.78 At the local level, too, middle school graduates were notorious for being lazy and unproductive when hired by village offices.79 The interactions between colonial officials and middle school graduates convinced the GGK even more of the reliability of “model rural youth.”

In addition to being viewed as a step toward educational advancement, the volunteer program brought a benefit in job prospects, especially for the early trainees. Like their Taiwanese and Japanese counterparts, they were promised a special advantage in obtaining jobs after discharge, particularly in the police force and local administration.80 “Early applicants encouraged one another to apply, saying that they could become village secretaries afterwards,”

Kim Yǒng-han said.81 For the first few years, not all volunteer soldiers served in the military after training, let alone deployed to the battlefield. Once they returned to their home villages and became village secretaries or police officers, they were exempted from further military service.82

In other words, one way out of military service, seen better in retrospect, was to graduate from the volunteer soldier training center early on and get settled as local officials during the process of war mobilization.

78 “Shiganhei ōbosha 7 man 9 sen,” Chōsen tsūshin 166, no. 4120 (February 13, 1940): 4-6. 79 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda, 209. 80 “Chedaehu chiwonbyŏng chikop ŭl yudae,” Chosŏn ilbo January 20, 1938, 2. 81 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27, 2011. 82 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda, 29. About half of the Korean volunteer soldiers were put in the reserves. Palmer, Fighting for The Enemy, 89.

#309 Youth under Total Mobilization

The various youth training programs focused on elementary school graduates to cultivate a reliable layer of national “pillars” in the early 1930s. But the war drove the GGK to build a more inclusive network for total mobilization. Soon the youth programs were transformed into institutions that would reach every young male villager. The series of new regulations and programs in the 1940s moved toward total inclusion. Although historical scholarship has tended to depict the state steadily intensifying its control over the population through the 1930s until the end of war in 1945, from the viewpoint of the youth, total mobilization was not a continuation from previous programs that opened up new career opportunities. It required new strategies to counter the state power over their lives. Rural youth like Kim Yǒng-han maneuvered to avoid control by the state by choosing which cog of the war machine he would become.

Total mobilization on the Korean peninsula was largely managed by the Chōsen League.

Established as a semi-governmental organization in 1939, it promoted the programs of National

Spiritual Mobilization and built a network of aikokuhan (patriotic units) to reach every household in Korea. Aikokuhan, similar to the tonarigumi in Japan or the baojia strengthened in

Taiwan, oversaw mutual cooperation and policing among ten or so households to fulfill the mandatory contribution of rice and metal, reform daily customs, and reinforce thought policing of their group.83 Compared to the revitalization groups [shinkōkai] of the Rural Revitalization

Campaign, which were supposedly voluntary organizations, aikokuhan groups were compulsory and left little space for initiative of the villagers.

83 Kokumin seishin sōdōin Chōsen renmei, Chōsen ni okeru kokumin seishin sōdoin (Seoul: Kokumin seishin sōdōin Chōsen renmei, 1940), 1-58.

#310 Ideologically, Spiritual Mobilization did not depart from what former Governor-General

Ugaki Kazushige founded in the 1930s. His famous slogan of shinden kaihatsu (spiritual field cultivation) functioned as the moral basis of the new movement.84 In 1939, Korean agriculture was damaged by a severe drought, and more than half of the farming population harvested less than 30% of the average annual yield. Even the drinking water in wells dried up.85 To recover from the famine and turn Korea into a “military base for the continent,” increasing agricultural production became an even more urgent task assigned to the villages. Journalists echoed the importance of “the re-organization of agriculture” to accelerate the programs initiated by the

Ugaki administration.86 Although industrial production was expanded in the northern part of

Korea to meet military needs, agrarianism and the “farmers’ spirit” lost no importance in the campaign. Agrarian ideals and militarism were still twinned. “The farmer’s dojo is a military camp for farmers,” argued Watanabe Toyohiko, who happened to be a former director of education in Miyagi who became an expert in agricultural development in the GGK bureaucracy.87

The seinendan was also transformed from “middling-class”-centered institutions to an all-inclusive network. In January 1941, Vice Governor-General Ōno Rokuichirō issued a decree to re-organize the seinendan through the provincial governors. Now called the Chōsen Seinendan

(Korean Youth Association), it included all male youth between the ages of 14 and 30 who were not attending school and, for the first time, unmarried female youth between 14 and 25 years of

84 For example, see Chūsei-nandō, Kyōka iin hikkei (Taejǒn: Chūsei-nando, 1940), 4-9. 85 See Higuchi Yūichi, Senjika Chōsen no nōmin seikatsushi 1939-1945 (Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha, 1998), 205-217. 86 See the series of articles on Chōsen nōgyō no saihensei in Chōsen 330 (November 1942): 14-90. 87 Watanabe Toyohiko, “Nōmin dōjō wa nōmin no heiei,” Kokumin sōryoku (November 1942): 28-33.

#311 age.88 Unlike the earlier seinendan, the central goal was to teach uneducated children and youth

Japanese language and military discipline.89 As always, the question of universal schooling accompanied the discussion of military service and total mobilization, but even with a rapid increase in school facilities, the schooling rate barely reached 50% in the 1940s.90 The previous seinendan for elementary school graduates were re-named “seinentai (youth corps)” as branch units of the Chōsen Seinendan. The new regulation included the earlier emphases on Emperor- centered nationalism, the unity between Japan and Korea, group discipline, and improvement of agricultural production. It also stated that the main character of the new organization rested in nurturing “the ideologies of national defense.”91 To achieve this goal, the youth corps and youth training centers were expected to closely coordinate their military training programs.

On paper, with the help of the network of aikokuhan (patriotic units), the expansion of the seinendan led to a rapid increase in participants. At the same time, the jump from the pre-1941 seinendan was so significant that it widened the gap between reality and the fantasy of official statistics. Kim Yǒng-han argued that the years when he participated (1936-1940) were the most active for the village seinendan, but as war mobilization progressed, many youth had to leave their villages for military and industrial service. Based on his experience, Kim did not believe that the village seinendan functioned as a mandatory institution although he knew it started to

88 The “(male) youth” section was divided into three categories: (1) students of seinen kurenjo, (2) those between 14 and 20 years of age and not students of the seinen kunrenjo, and (3) those between the ages of 20 and 30. Children between 10 and 14 of age who were not attending school also formed the “boys” section. 89 Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku shakai kyōiku-ka, Chōsen shakai kyōiku yōran (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1941), 27-39. Similar details could be found in Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku “Seinendan no shintaisei kaisetsu,” Bunkyō no Chōsen 188 (April 1941): 51- 77. 90 The national average of the elementary school enrollment rate was 41.6% (male: 60.8%, female: 22.2%) in 1940, 47.4% (male: 66.1%, female 29.1%) in 1942. O Sǒng-ch’ǒl, Singminji ch'odŭng kyoyuk ŭi hyŏngsŏng (Seoul: Kyoyuk kwahaksa, 2000),133. 91 Chōsen sōtokufu, Chōsen shakai kyōiku yōran 1941, 35.

#312 recruit youth with no schooling.92 For him, village youth groups continued to refer to the exclusive groups of model youth until the end of the war. Newspapers of the time reported that many Koreans mistrusted the intentions behind the change in the nature of the seinendan, worrying whether it would send youth to other places as forced labor or young women to

Manchuria for forced marriage.93 Overall, the establishment of universal seinendan to train uneducated youth seems to have failed entirely.

The peak of total mobilization for the young male population was mandatory military conscription, which began in Korea upon request of the Tokyo government in 1944.94 The conscription program was different fundamentally from the volunteer soldier program in a way that resembled the Taiwanese case. Minami Jirō had already expressed his hope to implement universal conscription in Korea when he became Governor-General of Korea in 1936.95 It was not a surprise, therefore, when the conscription program was announced in 1942, but it triggered a mixture of expectation, confusion, and resistance throughout the peninsula. For Korean intellectuals, the conscription decree provided leverage for negotiation when they pressed for suffrage and universal education. Both issues gained approval from Tokyo toward the end of the war.96 For the youth themselves, the decree gave very little incentive other than the hope that

92 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27, 2011. 93 “Seinendan kaiso to ryūgen higo,” Maeil sinpo editorial, in Chōsen tsūshin 4497 (May 29, 1941): 1-3. 94 Tanaka Takeo, “Koiso sōtoku jidai no tōchi gaikan,” Chōsen kindai shiryō kenkyū shūsei 3 (May 1960): 243. 95 Mitarai Tatsuo, Minami Jirō (Tokyo: Minami Jirō denki kankōkai, 1957), 433-5. See Higuchi Yūichi, Senjika Chōsen no minshū to chōhei (Tokyo: Sōwasha, 2001), 28-33. 96 According to Tanaka Takeo, then-Vice Governor of Korea, the Government-General in Taiwan insisted that it would implement universal elementary education sooner than Korea, which pressured the GGK to match the speed. Tanaka, “Koiso sōtoku jidai,” 219-222.

#313 they might be better fed in the army than in their villages should they be hit by famines like those of 1939 and 1942.

The campaigns of moral suasion had not prepared impoverished Korean farmers for mandatory conscription. The increase in elementary schools in the 1930s came too late. In the

1940s, more than 70% of the male population of conscription age did not understand Japanese.97

If recruited, they would need basic training in the Japanese language. Because the new seinendan managed to do so little to address this problem, on the eve of the start of conscription, the GGK hurried to find a solution. In Japan and Taiwan, this was not a significant problem since elementary schools were widespread, and night schools and the seinendan helped to maintain the academic level of the graduates. Lacking a similar capacity, the GGK had to start a new program in 1942, the renseijo (training facility), for youth with little schooling.98 In the training facility, working youth received Japanese language training for 12 hours a week, 600 hours a year.99 But this makeshift program had little effect. In 1944, 68% of conscription-aged youth still did not understand Japanese and the government had to give the conscription exam in Korean.100

Since the government intended Korean manpower mainly for use as industrial labor, the scope of enlistment was much narrower in Korea than in Japan.101 Still, the loopholes in the system had the effect of filtering out those with sufficient means to maneuver through it. As a

97 Higuchi, Senjika Chōsen no minshū to chōhei, 58. 98 Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku rensei-ka “Chōheisei no jisshi to Chōsen seinen no tokubetsu rensei,” Bunkyō no Chōsen 84 (February 1943): 27-32. 99 Chōsen sōtokufu gakumu-kyoku rensei-ka “Chōheisei no jisshi to Chōsen seinen no tokubetsu rensei,” Bunkyō no Chōsen 84 (February 1943): 27-32. 100 Higuchi, Senjika Chōsen no minshū to chōhei, 58. 101 273,139 draft notices were sent out, 206,057 underwent the military exams, and 55,000 were placed on active duty. Palmer, 112-117.

#314 result, the majority of conscripts came from the poor strata of farmers, which then lost manpower in the already desperate rural conditions. Korean conscripts were mostly deployed in administrative roles and as rear support troops, and many anecdotes indicate that Korean youth frequently evaded the conscription exam or deserted from the army.102 Japanese officials issued a statement that the confusion was normal considering that Japan too had met resistance when it first implemented universal military service in the Meiji era.103 But this only underlined the difficulty of recruiting Korean youth from poor families and transforming them into reliable soldiers.

Larger in scale of mobilization was the employment of military employees [gunzoku] and forced labor that absorbed young manpower from rural villages. As in Taiwan, many who were hired as military personnel between 1937 and 1941 had relatively high educational background or technical skills. They served as interpreters, technicians, sailors, and drivers.104 After 1941, the scale of recruitment for military contractors expanded. Some Koreans became prison guards for

POWs in Southeast Asia and were convicted as Class B or C war criminals by the Allies in trials after the war. Others were construction workers who built military bases in newly occupied

South Pacific islands.105 Between 1937 and 1945, Japan employed 4.1 to 7 million Koreans as laborers, either in private companies or government agencies, and later as conscript laborers.

102 Palmer, Fighting for The Enemy, 117-136. For example, on one incident in 1944, even high-ranking Korean military officers rebelled against the Japanese army, organizing a group desertion of Korean conscripts. Also see Higuchi, Senjika Chōsen no minshū to chōhei, 205-208. 103 “Hantō ni chōheisei” Kokumin sōryoku 4, no.6 (June 1942): 4-6. 104 In 1937, out of 598 gunzoku, 391 were drivers and 111 were interpreters. Higuchi Yūichi, Kōgun heishi ni sareta Chōsenjin (Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha, 1991), 13. 105 The exact number is not known but combined with the forced labor, Higuchi estimates 20,000 went to the South. Higuchi Senjika Chōsen no minshū to chōhei, 177.

#315 Millions were re-located to Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Most came from rural areas, and sometimes they were conscripted so suddenly or forcefully that they could not even inform their families.106 Since the families of labor conscripts were not allowed to talk about it, villagers did not know how many youth went as laborers, or where they went, but Kim recalled that “most of my seinendan friends either went to the military or were recruited as laborers.”

The result of the labor mobilization—nearly 10% of the Korean population were forced to relocate to China, Manchuria, Japan, or the Pacific—was a rapid disappearance of people from rural villages.107 Combined with voluntary migration, almost no young people of around 20 years of age remained in the southern parts of Korea by 1943, a mobilization officer witnessed.108 The age makeup in a village in South Chǒlla in 1944 shows the disappearance of working-age men and women—mostly between 20 and 40 years of age. The clear prospect of leaving the village deprived new institutions like the all-in seinendan and training facilities of any real effect on the village life. In this situation, the Rural Youth Industry was at its demise— the end of village youth leadership both in ideological terms and as available manpower.

The Last Dream of a New Frontier: “Rural Elite” Youth and the Totalitarian State

As wartime mobilization engulfed the lives of a large number of Koreans, the middling- class youth who previously took advantage of the governmental youth training institutions in the countryside found themselves in a difficult position. The emphasis on “youth,” which had earlier helped young men counter the age hierarchy in village society, continued in slogans and

106 Palmer, Fighting for The Enemy, 139-182. 107 Higuchi, Senjika Chōsen no nōmin seikatsushi, 100. For close calculation, see Kang Sŏng-ŭn, “Senjika Nihon teikokushugi no Chōsen nōson rōdōryoku shūdatsu seisaku,” Rekishi hyōron 355 (November 197): 37-41. 108 Yoshida Seiji, Chōsenjin ianfu to Nihonjin (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu ōraisha, 1977), 116, cited in Kang Sŏng-ŭn, Kang Sŏng-ŭn, “Senjika Nihon teikokushugi,” 41.

#316 propaganda. But in the time of “national emergency,” it had a new meaning—the demand that youth submit to state control.

One way to avoid the complete loss of independence was to find the loopholes in the mobilization system. Becoming a village secretary, for example, provided young people with some protection from mobilization. Another option, especially if they clung to a dream of educational success, was to join a prestigious program like the volunteer soldiers. The GGK prepared a few new programs with high prestige to co-opt the sense of elitism, such as the Young

Volunteer Corps for the Development of Manchuria-Mongolia [Manmō kaitaku seishōnen giyūgun] and the Korea Agricultural Patriotic Service Youth Corps.

Kim Yǒng-han had been jumping successfully from one position to another over the course of the 1930s. When the Pacific front of the war began in late 1941, he was working at the

Nonsan county office. He was content with his work, recalling that “many villagers envied me because I was only 20 years old or so and had already become a local official.”109 As the war progressed, he noticed that “Japanese were disappearing” from his workplace as they were conscripted into the military.110 In 1944, he was surprised by the news that even the son of his

Japanese superior studying at Tokyo Imperial University had become a “volunteer student soldier.”111 When military conscription was about to start in Korea, Kim missed the mandatory conscription age by one year. A more likely fate for someone in his situation was labor conscription. Like many other youth in his position, Kim studied the exemption rules carefully:

“village and town secretaries, police officers, and higher-rank officials were exempted… many

109 Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda, 114. 110 Ibid., 44. 111 Ibid., 116.

#317 middle-school graduates suddenly rushed to apply for positions of village secretary for this reason.”112 His official job in Nonsan county would not exempt him.

He found a way around the rules by joining a new position managed by the county office.

Kim remembered that “the county office needed me to stay so it sent me to a local unit of the Air

Defense Guards—they did that to many good employees.” He first had to pass an exam on the identification of different models of aircraft, but once he joined the Air Defense Guards, it guaranteed him an exemption from labor conscription. His life as a guard involved around-the- clock three-hour shifts of training, watching, and resting. He considered it “exactly the same as the military, with uniforms and caps all provided, like the seinendan.” Some former seinendan members also joined local units that consisted of 70 to 100 guards each. The Air Defense Guards not only helped him remain in Nonsan county, but also offered the possibility of promotion. “The supervisor told us that, if Japan wins, the guards who worked hard would receive the Eighth

Order of Merit,” said Kim and explained how honorable that would have been. In the end, there were no serious air raids in Korea, only a few minor bombings near Nonsan, which destroyed a bridge and construction materials. Kim Yŏng-han was still serving in his unit when he heard the news of the Japanese surrender in August 1945.113

Besides seeking a position in which they could escape state control, many middling-class youth chose to join other programs outside Korea that would potentially bring better social status

112 An interview with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27, 2011. 113 Interviews with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 27 2011 and February 13, 2012.

#318 and job prospects.114 Manchuria, which appeared to many to be a solution to domestic problems in Japan and Korea, including lack of resources, inter-ethnic tensions, and persistent rural poverty, was depicted as a new frontier for model rural youth. The government set up “the Young

Volunteer Corps for the Development of Manchuria-Mongolia” first for Japanese rural youth, but invited Koreans to join in 1940. The GGK called this program the foundation for the development of Manchurian agriculture and the realization of Manchukuo ideals of racial harmony. Admission was highly competitive and the trainees were selected from elementary school graduates between 15 and 20 years of age. They went through eight months of training in

Kangwŏn province and three months in the famous Uchihara training center in Ibaraki, Japan, before spending a year and six months in training facilities in Manchuria. This program was solely for training purposes and only provided three yen salary per month in addition to basic daily needs. The greatest attraction emphasized by the GGK was that Korean youth would share the experience with Japanese youth, embodying the “racial harmony” upon which Manchukuo was alleged to be built.115 The stress on the power of “youth” in the new frontier and the strict qualification requirements boosted the prestige of the program in the eyes of middling-class

114 Since the early 1930s, many young people left their villages of their own volition to go to Japan or Manchuria. In a study on the population movement conducted in Talli hamlet in Ulsan, South Kyǒngsang, in 1935, those between 16 and 25 of age tended to leave the village more than any other age group. The study showed that Japan was the first choice for those in the upper- and middle-class villagers whereas the lower-class peasants migrated within Korea. Manchuria was a choice for “the upper-class with significant capital who would want to do their own business,” “middle-class people with technical skill but could not go to Japan,” and “those from upper- and middle- class who went bankrupt and turned themselves into agricultural immigrants.” The researchers also found that nearly all elementary school graduates left the village because “Korean rural villages and agriculture do not have the power to attract them culturally or economically… The power of young ‘new’ people is suppressed under the older generations and customs, and their desire to devote themselves to the construction of rural culture is also hindered by the authorities.” Nichi-Man nōsei kenkyūkai Tōkyō jimusho, Chōsen nōson no jinkō haishutsu kikō (Tokyo: Nichi-Man nōsei kenkyūkai, 1940), 12-26. 115 Shirohara Jō, “Man-Mō kaitaku seinen giyūtai ni tsuite,” Bunkyō no Chōsen 223 (June 1944): 45-50. See also Higuchi, Senjika Chōsen no nōmin seikatsushi, 140-141.

#319 youth, quite unlike the mass migration of poorer peasants to Manchuria that the GGK conducted simultaneously.116

Another frontier advertised by the GGK to ambitious rural youth was the Japanese countryside. Especially after the beginning of the Pacific war, traveling to Japan as something other than a laborer became unimaginable, forcing Kim Yǒng-han to abandon his plan to study in

Japan. Unless they had significant capital of their own, study trips through the seinendan or local village offices were the only way to visit Japan. 70 years later, Kim still wished that he had had a chance to join a study trip to Japan as a model seinendan member, a program that did not exist in

Kwangsǒk village. What helped increase the morale of youth like Kim was the Korea

Agricultural Patriotic Service Youth Corps. It began in 1940 and dispatched rural youth to Japan to learn Japanese agricultural practices. Fifteen times between 1940 and 1944, a group of between 20 and 300 youths were sent to rural villages and lived for one month mainly with the farming families whose sons or fathers were away or died in the military. The participants were selected from the graduates of rural youth training centers.

Journalist Kagawa Tomomi called them the “troops of the sacred plow”—they marched in an orderly fashion in their military-like uniform, sporting a seinendan-like flag.117 In addition to capitalize on the desire of youth to travel to Japan, the program produced many “beautiful anecdotes” as they called, which depicted the harmony between Japan and Korea for propaganda purposes. GGK officials reported such comments of the participants, as “I was so moved because

116 Interviews with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on February 13, 2012. Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwonhoe, Chibang ǔl salda, 30. 117 Kagawa Tomomi, “Chōsen nōgyō hōkoku seinentai wo genchi ni miru,” Chōsen 327 (August 1942): 55.

#320 the families welcomed us in the rain as if we were returning soldiers”118 and “Japanese elderly work very hard. They work nearly three times harder than Korean youth. I wonder how they can work so much.”119 Women’s labor and the centrality of ancestral worship intrigued these youth.120 The Japanese families also offered enthusiastic comments about the sincerity and diligence of Korean youth. They were often amazed at their mastery of the Japanese language and their politeness. Many villages were divided about accepting Korean farmers, but after they lived with the trainees, “their doubt turned to gratitude… the villagers understood the real

Korean people.” “An aged grandmother was exhilarated to have a Korean young man as if her grandson had come back.” “Our bonds deepened over the short period of one month. We grew close to each other, and it felt as if I was sending off my own son at their tearful departure.”121

These programs to maintain the morale of rural elite youth notwithstanding, the contradictory reality of intensifying total mobilization overwhelmed the GGK’s intentions. In the county office, Kim Yǒng-han confronted the sabotage of mobilization efforts by government agencies and villagers alike—the provincial government rarely provided the full amount of food stipulated to by rationing to county or village offices, and villagers often tried to escape the mandatory contribution of food and other materials. In this widening gap between the state and villagers, the model rural youth who had earlier managed to bridge both worlds as “pillars” of the nation lost their leverage in village society. State efforts to align with rural youth were at an end.

118 Kagawa Tomomi, “Chōsen nōgyō hōkoku seinentai (shōzen),” Chōsen 329 (October 1942): 93. 119 Kagawa Tomomi, “Chōsen nōgyō hōkoku seinentai wo genchi ni miru,” Chōsen 327 (August 1942): 63. 120 Chōsen sōtokufu nōrin-kyoku nōsei-ka, Nōgyō hōkoku seinentai ki (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1942), 13-50. 121 Ibid,. 51-54.

#321 Did the Rural Youth Industry in South Ch’ungch’ǒng, flourishing in a short period of time between the 1930s and very early 1940s, instill an identity as Japanese subjects in rural youth, particularly? This is a difficult question to investigate today because, unlike Xu Chongfa and Huang Yuanxing in Taiwan, their Korean counterparts would avoid the topic to protect themselves from being accused as colonial collaborators. Yet, descriptions of Kim Yǒng-han’s everyday life indicate that they did not question or react against the rhetoric of Japanese nationalism. Kim’s favorite reading was battlefield reports written by a popular Japanese author,

Hino Ashihei. He enjoyed a lecture by Japan’s leading agrarian activist and scholar, Yamazaki

Nobuyoshi. Kokumin sōryoku (Total Strength of the Nation), the GGK’s wartime magazine, was

Kim’s primary source of news. He remembered that he was greatly inspired by a story in the magazine about an entire class of female students in Maizuru (Muhak) Woman’s High School in

Seoul applying to join the women’s volunteer corps [teishintai].122 Like Taiwanese and Japanese rural youth in the early 1940s, Korean youth like Kim incorporated the prose and propaganda used by the state into their lives, finding even entertainment and inspiration in them. Youth programs lost attraction as a source of social opportunities for Kim Yǒng-han, and he did not feel the same pressure to become a volunteer soldier as Huang Yuanxing. Nonetheless, in the youth training and pursuit of successful career, he came to accept the rhetoric and ideology of Japanese nationalism through a similar mechanism that produced a nationalistic population in other parts of the Japanese empire. In other words, it was despite the brutality of total mobilization—not

122 Interviews with Kim Yǒng-han in Taejǒn on November 23 and 27, 2011 and February 13 and 29, 2012. Despite the fact that many Korean people choose to maintain silence regarding their eager participation in Japan’s war effort, some gave a reflection that the participation was a natural thing to do, especially for children and youth. One example is Pak Ch’ang-hǔi’s comment that he considers collecting scrapped iron and pine oil as a good thing to do when he was a child, and does not know how Koreans could retain a sense of nation-hood if there had been no August 15 liberation. Tanaka, “Koiso sōtoku jidai,” 248-249.

#322 because of it—that a group of ambitious youth internalized a sense of Japanese agrarian nationalism based on their aspirations and emotions created within their immediate social surroundings.

Conclusion

The mobilization in 1930s Korea rested on the belief of Governor-General of Korea,

Ugaki Kazushige, that agrarianism and militarism constituted the foundation of the Japanese national spirit. For Ugaki, an army general and national politician, Korea was a field of operation where he could demonstrate his abilities as a capable leader.123 When the Sino-Japanese War began in 1937, Taiwan had claimed to be more successful in raising the schooling rate, which added to a sense of rivalry between the two colonies.124 To compensate for the low literacy rate in the Korean countryside, the GGK hurried to expand youth training programs and elementary schools.

The total nature of the mobilization, including military personnel, labor conscription, and patriotic units networks, however, had a reverse effect of preventing ambitious youth from devoting themselves to the imperial cause of war. In Korea, the “middling-class” youth of the post-1920 generation created the Rural Youth Industry of a smaller scale during the Rural

Revitalization Campaign. After the start of the war, unlike Taiwan, where its own version of the

Rural Youth Industry had just begun to emerge, total mobilization in Korea reduced their access to the means of social advancement. In the same way experienced by the Japanese countryside, a

123 Scholar Miyata Setsuko argues that Ugaki Kazushige, as Governor-General, exercised dictatorial power over Korea. Miyata Setsuko, “Chōsen ni okeru ‘Nōson shinkō undo,’” Kikan gendaishi 5 (Spring 1973): 53. 124 Tani Yasuyo argues that the Government-General in Taiwan might have manipulated statistical results owing to the sense of competition against Korea as an older colony. Tani Yasuyo, Daitōa kyōeiken to Nihongo (Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 2000), 53.

#323 large number of Korean young men relocated outside their villages for mobilization. Despite the intensive institutional effort, mobilization did not lead to an expansion of the Rural Youth

Industry, but instead, to its demise.

The end of the mutual co-optation between model rural youth and the GGK does not make the Japanese agrarianism expressed by the Korean youth during the 1930s any less “real” compared to that of their Japanese and Taiwanese counterparts. The prose of the state empowered these youth in village politics, giving them a voice of authority against older leaders.

In fact, the combination of pragmatic benefits in pursuing success and a feeling of moral superiority over the social establishment drove youth like Kim Yǒng-han to accept the rhetoric of

Japanese nationalism. This was similar to the mechanism seen in Miyagi and Xinzhu.

The analysis of “model rural youth” with attention to their generational and geographical backgrounds offers an important intervention to the issue of colonial collaborators. The collaborator has been a political topic especially since the democratization of South Korea in the

1990s. The presidential truth-finding committee listed hundreds of “pro-Japanese collaborators” in 2005 based on the assumption that the upper-strata of Koreans exploited the lower-strata by selling their ethnic identity for personal benefits.125 But in the 1930s, all classes tried to achieve better lives through governmental mobilization, and among them, the new middling class, where

Kim Yǒng-han belonged, was successful in particular. More importantly, the Korean ethnic identity, however strongly embraced, did not function as a moral obligation to resist colonial

125 “World Briefing. Asia: South Korea: Crackdown on Collaborators,” New York Times, May 3, 2007. Andrew Wolman, “Looking Back While Moving Forward: The Evolution of Truth Commissions in Korea,” Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal 14, no. 3 (May 2013): 39-41. One example of class-based definition of collaborators and victims is the reinvestigation of war criminals. In November 2006 the “truth commission” investigated the convicted class B and C war criminals and cleared of their guilty verdicts. It deliberately left out those who were armed police and high-ranking officials because the commission assumed that they were “volunteered.” Kangje tongwon ‘Chosǒnin chǒnbǒm’ omyǒng pǒsotta,” Sǒul sinmun, November 13, 2006.

#324 mobilization for many people. Kim did not think that he had pursued his career at the expense of the Korean ethnic community. Until the war was over, he did not see Korean-ness and Japanese- ness as mutually exclusive. The social mobility and dynamics of rural villages seen from the viewpoint of agrarian youth cannot be captured by the retrospective definition of “collaborators” and “betrayal against the Korean nation.” Rather, they highlight the fluid nature of class and identity in the actual lives of village youth.126 ! !

126 For discussion on the problem of the concept of “collaboration” in the East Asian context, see Konrad Mitchell Lawson, “Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937-1953,” (PhD diss. Harvard University, 2012), 15-23.

#325 ![Kim Yǒng-han at the Shinkō Seinendan Training in Kapsa (August 1940)] Provided by Kim Yǒng-han

#326 ![Yusǒng Rural Youth Training Center] Chōsen! (April 1936): front page. ! !

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

#327 ![Expansion of Seinendan in Official Statistics] Top: Numbers of Seinendan groups in 1932 and between 1936 and 1943 (Korea and South !Ch’ungch’ǒng.) Bottom: Numbers of Seinendan members in 1932 and between 1936 and 1943 (Korea and South !Ch’ungch’ǒng.) Sources: Chosen nenkan 1932, 1937-1943; Chōsen sōtokufu, Chōsen shakai kyōiku yōran (Seoul: !Chōsen sōtokufu, 1937), 93 for the data of 1936. Official statistics show a jump in 1941, mainly because statistics included figures for the young women’s groups and the younger boys’ groups. It is also because seinendan participation became mandatory, but Kim Yǒng-han’s memory and the recruitment process of army conscription reveal the reality in which all-in participation was not readily reinforced.

#328 ! ![The Demographic Structure in Haenan village, Chǒlla namdo] Higuchi Yūichi, Senjika Chōsen no nōmin seikatsushi 1939-1945 (Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha, 1998), 97. A graph based on the date in “Nōka no rōdō jōken ni kansuru ichi chōsa,” Chōsen nōkaihō, Chōsen nōkai chōsa-ka (February 1944).

! men women !

age ! ! ! !

number of people ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

#329 ! ! ! ! ! Conclusion !

The Japanese empire built a number of training institutions for young men in the countryside to spread agrarian nationalism, create hardworking farmers, and turn them into loyal and capable soldiers. Mobilization relied on the paradox of empowerment and control—unless agrarian youth found social opportunities useful in their local contexts, state mobilization could not discipline or persuade them.

The large scale of rural youth mobilization reflected the widely-shared drive for “nation- empire” building. In all the three locations discussed in this dissertation, the avowed commitment to nationalization and assimilation influenced policy directions and mindsets of officials and schoolteachers. Even after a number of failed attempts, they increased their effort to analyze rural societies from within, stimulate generational and regional identities, and convert them into national “pillars of youth.” Japan established an unusually large bureaucracy and a thick ruling apparatus in the colonies not only to implement authoritarian policies generated in

Tokyo, Taipei, and Seoul, but also to work within peripheral communities and create a new generation of local leaders.

I coined the term “Rural Youth Industry” to highlight the mutual attempts of co-optation between the state and youth. In the Rural Youth Industry, youth interpreted the state policy in their local contexts and diverse social relationships. Because of the multifaceted nature of their

#330 incentives, their reactions to mobilization defy terms like “brainwash” and “resistance.” The

Rural Youth Industry allows us to examine the social dynamics that lay under the rhetoric of the state. At the same time, it also shows how powerfully state mobilization operated through the capacious concept of “rural youth.” The job opportunities created by state training institutions altered the lives and self-images of village youth. Job prospects produced both pragmatic and psychological incentives. Turning mobilization into mobility was often an emotional process— they developed affective bonds with instructors and peers, overcame envy for urban intellectual youth, and confronted their parents. The state ideology provided them with a moral basis to assert superiority over the urban, the educated, and the old. In short, they internalized the ideology of Japanese nationalism as a moral compass while enhancing their self-value by pursuing careers as “model rural youth.”

The preceding chapters attempted to show both similarities and differences in the development of the Rural Youth Industry in three locations. The politics of creating ideal “rural youth” followed a broad pattern—the role of local modernizers moved from dominant landlords to the privileged youth, and then to elementary school graduates. The processes of nationalization of Japanese village youth and assimilation of Taiwanese and Korean village youth relied on the common social position of youth, determined particularly by the rural-urban, educated-uneducated, and generational divides. In the 1930s and early 40s, Xinzhu’s village youth, for example, developed a similar kind of self-image with that of Miyagi’s village youth rather than that of Taipei youth. The empire took advantage of the category of “rural youth” that crossed ethnic differences to facilitate nation-building.

The new identities created were not limited to the geographical conditions and the age of

#331 youth. Generations, defined by people who were born in specific decades, created their own dynamics in each place. Among many different generations, those who grew up during the intensive kyōka (moral suasion) campaigns—after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 in Japan and Cultural Rule of the 1920s in Taiwan and Korea—became the protagonists of the Rural

Youth Industry.

As products of social tensions, Japanese nationalisms expressed by the Japanese,

Taiwanese, and Korean village youth carried a similar range of emotions. The degrees of internalization, passion, and skepticism cloaked in nationalistic phrases varied from person to person and from time to time. Their differences were not determined by their “ethnic identity” predating mobilization, however, as often presumed by nationalist historians today. It depended on more complex social environments—or in other words, whether their everyday social relationships benefited from the category of “rural youth” impacted youth’s acceptance of

Japanese nationalism.

Of course, there were many differences between Japan and its colonies and between

Taiwan and Korea. The colonial setting determined a significant proportion of the social conditions found in Taiwanese and Korean villages, such as the slower spread of school education and ethnic discrimination in the job market. Grudges and desperation among

Taiwanese and Korean agrarian youth were often products of colonial rule—the empire did not

“rescue” them from the indigenous social dynamics through rural youth mobilization. The structures of the Rural Youth Industry in Taiwan and Korea also reflected the colonial status. In

Japan, mobilization was more inclusive and comprehensive, whereas in Taiwan and Korea, it was more exclusive and competitive. The window of opportunities available for colonial agrarian

#332 youth was more limited by design.

The comparison of “rural youth” identity and the formation of the Rural Youth Industry might also offer a historical explanation for the divergence in colonial memory. The widespread

“pro-Japanese” attitude among Taiwanese people and the “anti-Japanese” sentiment among

Korean people are often attributed to postcolonial political conditions—the new “Taiwanese” identity against the Guomindang regime made the experience of Japanese rule a positive marker of identity, whereas in South Korea, colonial “collaborators” have been accused of facilitating authoritarian rule after 1945. The postwar narrative of “Japan as a victim” and the Japanese people’s ignorance of the imperial past propelled the postcolonial sentiment of the Taiwanese and

Koreans to develop in opposite directions. Yet questions arise: is this strictly an issue of memory construction developed after 1945? Or did the colonial experience in the pre-1945 period contribute to this divergence?

Based on the examination of rural youth mobilization at the village and personal levels, I argue that pre-1945 experiences, including pre-Japanese-rule social settings, have a profound impact. In Taiwan, the racial and ethnic tension in remote mountain villages led to quick acceptance of colonial administration and early establishment of Japanese language and elementary schools. Although Japanese education was popular by the 1930s, the colonial government postponed recruiting Taiwanese youth because of the ethnic kinship with the target of invasion, China. This in turn added fuel to the fanatic Japanization campaign. In contrast, in

Korea, because of the initial confrontation between Japanese settlers and local leaders and the highly stratified social system in which education was associated with the privileged class, schools spread only slowly in remote villages. Despite that, Governor-General Ugaki

#333 Kazushige’s firm belief in agrarian mass mobilization and Korea’s location linking Japan and

Manchuria led to a premature start of mobilization of elementary school graduates. These trajectories culminated in the difference in youth’s attitudes toward mobilization at the moment of Japanese surrender in August 1945. In Taiwan, the Rural Youth Industry was still growing, whereas that in Korea—more limited in scope in the first place—had collapsed. In the interviews, their impressions of Japanese rule at the moment of its demise seemed to have greatly impacted the narratives of their experiences.

The individuals introduced in this dissertation reflected on their days in Japanese youth programs on multiple occasions since Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945. Almost 70 years later, they chose to narrate youth training as a transformative experience in their lives, isolating the positive consequences of youth training from the hardship associated with colonial rule and war mobilization. They faced dramatic political upheavals that required resilient adjustments in the postwar period. In Japan, Katō Einojō lost most of the family inheritance during the land reform under the Allied occupation, but was elected as a city council member and took charge of education affairs. In Taiwan, Huang Yuanxing and Xu Chongfa immediately learned Mandarin

Chinese—Xu attended a language course offered by the Youth Group of Three People’s

Principles [sanminzhuyi qingniantuan], newly formed to celebrate the “return” of Taiwan to mainland China. Huang went back to the teaching career in the Beipu elementary school, while

Xu founded a tea leaf export company in the countryside of Xinzhu. In Korea, Kim Yǒng-han continued working in local administrative offices and later collected local cultural and historical materials for the South Ch’ungch’ǒng government and the National Institute of Korean History.

Their records and interviews showed their dismay and regret in having encouraged many youth

#334 to participate in Japan’s war effort. At the same time, they continued to value the traits of “model rural youth”—now decoupled from wartime Japanese nationalism— during the coming few decades under new rulers.

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