Colonial Korea in the eyes of Japanese historians: main directions of Japanese historiography in the late XIXth – XXth centuries

Abstract

The author presents an overview of Japanese historiography on colonial Korea (late 19th – 20th centuries). Mainstream Japanese historiography arose out of a fusion of Western historiography introduced by Ludwig Riess and the Chinese kōshōgaku tradition. Japanese historiography on East Asia generally followed the negative portrayals of China and Korea. Tokyo Imperial University’s 1890 history of Japan, the Kokushigan, argued for a common ancestry to Koreans and Japanese. Views of Korea's historical subjugation to Japan became widely accepted in Japanese scholarship. From the beginning of the XX century Japan promoted the idea of a joint and inseparable “Manchurian-Korean history”, where Korea was subjected to heteronomy in politics and economics. After WWII, the subject of colonization has been always featured prominently in such publications, ever since the founding of the Japanese Society for the Study of Korean History in 1959. Such publications featuring colonial history as Japanese history (1962) and an eight-volume series entitled Contemporary Japan and its Colonies played a crucial role in the Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi debates on Japan’s responsibility towards Asia in the early 80-s. About this time the Japanese Society for Colonial Studies was founded.