ABSTRACT
In fact, the Tong'a ilbo had strongly promoted cultural development, but it had done so in a way that was hardly palatable to the Japanese. Rather than promoting the official Japanese line of cultural assimilation, the newspaper had argued for a strengthening of Korean culture. Its pages also offered commentary on deficiencies of the Japanese culture that its colonial masters strove to export to the Korean peninsula. The policy change which allowed the emergence of the Tong'a ilbo was one of a series of reforms made in the early 1920s. Government officials also believed that the reforms would enable them to control Korean society more effectively by giving them new sources of information on public opinion. The newspaper willingly acknowledged the superiority of the Japanese in a number of fields including the sciences, politics, morals, and economics.
