ABSTRACT
Moritani Katsumi (1904–1964) is a largely unknown figure in the intellectual history of colonial Korea and imperial Japan. However, he was actively involved in the production of colonial knowledge in the late 1930s as he attempted to link colonial Korea to the notion of the East Asian Community. This chapter first explores the Japanese Marxian discussion of the Orient by focusing on how Japanese Marxist social scientists endorsed the concept of imperial Japan as advanced and the rest of Asia as underdeveloped. Challenging this line of thinking, Moritani called for colonial Korea to be restructured in the remaking of Japan’s Pan-Asian empire. In an attempt to optimize Japan’s Pan-Asian discourses in colonial Korea, he argued that agricultural mechanization and spatial development would be the key to Korea’s becoming an integral part of a Japan-led Asian community. In doing so, this chapter reveals how Moritani theorized Korea’s place within the Japanese empire and presented a Koreanized vision of the East Asian Community to optimize the mobilization of human resources and the exploitation of economic resources in colonial Korea for Japan’s war efforts.
