A History of Korea by Jinwung Kim

Author:Jinwung Kim [Kim, Jinwung]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253000781
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Economic Changes

As a colony of the expanding Japanese empire, Korea was primarily a source of raw materials and food, but it also provided markets for Japan’s industrial development. With little interest in the economic development of Korea, Japan continuously exploited Korea’s resources at the expense of most Koreans’ livelihood.

At the time of annexation, Korea was an overwhelmingly agrarian economy, and so Japan’s initial economic policy there was to increase agricultural production to meet Japan’s growing need for rice. In the late 1910s, Japan was experiencing a severe crisis in food supply as a result of maladjustments in its rapidly industrializing economy. In 1918 the price of rice skyrocketed, leading to serious social unrest. Finally, rice riots broke out in many parts of Japan in August of that year. As Japanese demand for rice sharply increased, Korea became a rice-based colonial economy tightly controlled in the interests of creating a rice surplus to feed Japan. Beginning in the 1920s huge quantities of Korean rice were shipped to Japan; in the period between 1932 and 1936 the amount of rice exported reached the point where more than half of Korea’s total rice production was sent to Japan. As a result, many Koreans had to consume grain substitutes such as barley, sorghum, and millet.

Living conditions for Korea’s peasants had seriously deteriorated, with crushing poverty and debt, demanding nothing less than a radical change in the structure of Korea’s centuries-old land relations, in which privately owned land was concentrated in the hands of relatively few large landowners. Peasant cultivators were either small holders and tenants or laborers. The Japanese annexation of Korea not only did nothing to alter this structure to improve the peasants’ economic status; instead, it encouraged the separation of ownership from actual cultivation of land, which resulted in large-scale absentee landlordism.

As the concentration of landholdings in increasingly fewer hands became the trend, farm tenancy rapidly increased. The rate of Korean farmers owning no farmland rose from 37.7 percent in 1918 to 53.8 percent in 1932. By 1938 less than 20 percent of farmers owned all the land they tilled, about one-fourth owned some land and rented some, and farmers owning no land still amounted to over 50 percent.8

Landlessness always makes farmers less self-sufficient. The inequitable distribution of farmland caused great misery to tenants, for as the number of tenants increased and thus sharpened competition for land among tenants, tenancy rents became exorbitant. Generally, in previous years, tenant farmers paid rents amounting to 50 percent of the crop, but during the 1930s these rents in southern Korea ran up to 80 percent of the yield and were among the highest rents in the world. Keen competition among tenants made tenant farming almost a privilege. Many of the lease contracts for land were for a period of just one year, and so tenants faced constant renegotiations of leases, which caused utter insecurity for tenant families. The miserable tenancy conditions depressed Korean agriculture as a whole as well as the tenants themselves. With no

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