ABSTRACT
Japan played a number of mutually contradictory roles in early twentieth-century Korea. Some moderate nationalists, however, chose to accept for the time being Korea's position as a part of the Japanese Empire -in most cases in the hope of regaining independence after achieving some amount of modern progress under Japanese control. The common denominator in all these mutually contradictory ways of assessing Japan's significance for Korea was the acceptance of Japan as Korea's significant Other - against which Korea had to define itself and which it had at the same time to 'benchmark'. Cultural nationalists inside colonial Korea were simultaneously interested in the preservation of what they saw as an authentically Korean culture in a colonial setting and in using modern Japanese intellectual frameworks for their endeavour. In a way, being the colonizer which denied Korea its modern national statehood, Japan still remained the very symbol of modernity, even in the eyes of its political antagonists.
