ABSTRACT
When Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910, the Japanese settlers on the Korean Peninsula totaled over 170,000, forming one of the largest colonial communities in the world. Their sheer number, close to a million by the end of the colonial period in 1945, and their concentration in cities suggest that the Japanese penetration into Korea proceeded with an intensity of urban colonial encounter that bears some resemblance to the experience of pieds noirs in French Algeria. The Japanese colonial migration and settlement also had many similarities with the patterns of Western Europe in colonial Africa and elsewhere. Upon close scrutiny, however, differences between the Japanese and European settler colonial states seem more compelling. When compared to the Europeans in Algeria or the British in Kenya and in Southern Rhodesia in the early twentieth century, for instance, the Japanese settlers in Korea and in Taiwan had no analogous authority and influence over the colonial government. They certainly never gained or sought such control over the institutions of the colonial state as to fill the bulk of colonial bureaucracy, as the settlers in Algeria did by the 1920s, let alone declare independence from the metropolitan state, as the settlers in Southern Rhodesia later did. True, the settlers in colonial Korea dominated the local councils that were empowered with legislative authority in 1930. But when compared to the representative or legislative councils of the settler states in colonial Africa, they had a semblance of authority at best. This may come as no surprise to us, given the relative brevity of Japanese colonial rule, the heavy presence of bureaucrats in the colonies, and the centralizing tendencies of colonial administration (its excessive concern about security and appetite for control), to list a few of the distinguishing features of Japanese colonialism, but it bears mention and analysis nonetheless.
