Grassroots Origins of the Korea-US Alliance under Japan's Occupation

초록

The record of widespread mantra-meditation in North Jeolla Province in the 1920s shows the significance of the idea of cosmic change among former Tonghak (Eastern Learning) followers in the early part of twentieth-century Korea. The teachings propagated by the Guri Village meditation school were especially attractive to those Korean farmers in the occupied Korea who suffered most from Japan’s exorbitant rice-extraction program. Their home provinces was transformed into a key rice supply base for sustaining Japan’s export-oriented economy since 1920. Importation of more rice from the overseas territories was expected to supplement Japan’s struggling primary sector and thus to lower prices of foodstuffs for solving the subsistence crisis of their underpaid urban workers. The consequence of the rice extraction program was increasing tenancy and impoverishment in the largest rice farming lands, namely, Jeolla Province of Korea. Despite this aggravating standard of living their master advised his followers not to wage a violent anti-Japanese struggle, but rather wait until the United States was involved in the war against the Japanese Empire. Instead, the organization was involved in secret financing of the overseas independence movement. The notion of Korea-US millennium partnership fortified the conviction among the peasants that Japan’s occupation and expansionism was doomed and Korea would eventually be liberated. Their unique vision for eternal peace and beliefs in eventual victory can be an explanation as to why the once most revolutionary people of the same region appeared less resistant to Japan, but nevertheless faced relentless repression since the mid-1930s.