Since 1920s Japanese Imperial Forces enforced the spiritual control on the Korean people through the popular cultural domination, enhancing the strategical interest on the traditional culture which underlay the Korean emotion and consciousness. Since ...
Since 1920s Japanese Imperial Forces enforced the spiritual control on the Korean people through the popular cultural domination, enhancing the strategical interest on the traditional culture which underlay the Korean emotion and consciousness. Since the 1920s Japan conducted the survey and research on the condition of Korean society and culture in the view of colonial cultural strategy. Korean traditional culture was newly regarded as assimilative ideology to transform racial consciousness of the Korean public. That was not to abolish the traditional culture, but to use the national culture for spreading the colonial mind. To admit and emphasize the originality of Korean culture seemed to allow the racial independence of Koreans, but it could be dominative ideology when it transformed the contents of the originality. The form of 'respect for tradition' might justify the present on the basis of distorted past, enhancing the retrospective consciousness.
Japan invented and used the originality of the Korean traditional culture in two ways to spread 'assimilative ideology.' One is for assimilation in the view of Korean civilization, and the other is in the view of a hypothesis that Koreans and Japanese were from the same ancestor. Japan justified the civilized assimilation, focusing on the differentiation and inferiority of underdeveloped Korean culture compared to that of Japan. Japan also justified Korean colony, showing the similar cultural features of two countries. Such double aspects in treating Korean traditional culture was to show its cultural strategy of Japanese assimilative domination. 'Nae-Seon-Il-Che(內鮮一體)' and 'Whang-Min-Wha(皇民化)' are the slogans to emphasize the assimilation based on discrimination and at the same time to justify the discrimination. These slogans made the authority to consider assimilation natural. These two aspects were contradictory in some points, but they had the same goal to justify Japan's domination over Korean colony and establish the ideology of transforming Koreans to subjects of Japan. Japan used Korean culture as the way of enforcing Japanese national ideology, powering the cultural dominance over Korean public.
So Korean traditional culture was robbed of its original feature as 'national culture' and became 'colonial culture' in the 'false tradition' distorted by Japan's manipulative hands. In the history of modern and contemporary changes of Korea, the national and cultural consciousness which should have preserved in the traditional culture was transformed and deteriorated in the colonial cultural system.