The Prison and Power in Colonial Korea

Abstract

This article explores the dynamics of the colonial prisons constructed by the Japanese and the power they wielded and projected as a dual project of modernisation and colonisation in Korea. Japanese colonialism and its disciplinary power made colonial prisoners docile subjects by utilising the mechanisms of close surveillance, scientific correction and ideological conversion while excluding and oppressing political offenders as “imperial others” through the exercise of cruel corporal punishment. The article offers an in-depth analysis of colonial modernity in Korea by examining how colonial power operated throughout the birth and evolution of the modern prison, and the mechanisms through which it governed Korean subjects in its prison system.

Keywords:

• Korea
• Japan
• prison
• disciplinary power
• subject
• colonial modernity
• political prisoner

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This work was supported by a grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea, funded by the Korean government (NRF-2007-361-AL0013).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. After the early 1920s, those sentenced to imprisonment and fined accounted for around 30 and 60 per cent, respectively, of the total number of criminals on mainland Japan, whereas they comprised around 60 and 30 per cent in its colony, Korea (Yi, 1999, p. 32). This indicates that the colonial government depended more upon the physical force of the penal and prison system than did the home government.

2. Japanese corporal punishments were criticised for symbolising the barbarism of Western colonial domination, and thus the early Japanese colonial government argued for the “civilised and humane” nature of flogging in responding to this criticism (Umemori, 2006, p. 41).

3. Japanese colonialism in Korea shifted from military rule (1910–19) to cultural rule (1920–31) and from cultural rule to fascist ethnocide rule (1932–45).

4. Japan enforced a policy of ideological conversion (tenkō) to control Japanese socialists on the mainland and Korean political offenders on the peninsula between 1925 and 1945. Tenkō means a change in ideological position on the part of former anti-government radicals who underwent self-criticism and converted to the ideological position supported by the state. In many cases, ideological offenders renounced the left and embraced the Japanese imperial system. This policy was applied to colonial Korea when the Government-General issued the Maintenance of the Public Order Act in 1925 to prevent and punish Korean independence activists, centring on communists and nationalists. Along with the policy of ideological conversion, the review and enforcement procedures of parole in colonial Korea were specified in greater detail through the Regulation on the Examination of Parole. During the late 1930s, the parole system was utilised more as a technique of modern correction and ideological control because of a growing population of political offenders. Prisoners released on parole accounted for 1.7 per cent of the total number in 1911, but the paroled prisoners made up more than 5 per cent on average after the 1910s and almost 10 per cent during the period of Japanese wartime mobilisation (National Archives of Korea, 2012, pp. 335–336). Japanese ideological control of political offenders was successful to a certain degree, in that unconverted probationers comprised only 3.4 per cent of the total number of probationers as of December 1941 (Chi, 1998, p. 103).