Alexis Dudden Japan's Colonization of Korea; Discourse and Power (2006)

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. The previous March, theGovernor General s office had officially upheld certain torture practices in thepenal codes for use against Koreans.Anyone interested could read the ration-ale in English in the colonial regime s annual report: Flogging being a form ofpunishment practised in Korea for ages past, it seemed likely more effectiveas a measure of punishment for trifling offences than short imprisonment orsmall fines, provided it was done in a proper manner.Consequently it wasdecided to retain it, but only for application to native offenders.Themethod of infliction was also improved so that, by observing greater human-ity, unnecessary pain in carrying out a flogging could be avoided as far as pos-sible. 101 Despite the far-reaching implications of the Japanese government saction, the vast number of overturned convictions (ninety-nine) satisfied thetrial s international observers that their journeys had been worth the effort: pure and competent justice had come to Korea.The events bringing the so-called conspiracy proceedings to light cou-pled with the missionaries general satisfaction that the Japanese colonialregime legitimately ruled Korea underscore the partiality of external percep-tions of a particular regime s internal execution of justice.Governor GeneralTerauchi legally encoded torture for Koreans.In an open courtroom, Koreanprisoners described the horrors they endured, horrors that bespoke the deeplyheld beliefs of many Japanese colonizers: Koreans were refuse and merely theobjects of experimentation.In spite of the brutality of Japanese rule, the Pow-ers recognized the legality of Japan s display and openly abrogated their priv-ileges of consular jurisdiction a month after the first appeals trial ended.Forthe legal nations of the world, Japan s rule of Korea was fully legal in interna-tional terms.CodaA Knowledgeable EmpireT he Meiji state aggrandizers mission to declare Japan a legitimate imperial-ist power came at enormous expense both to Japan and the countries Japancolonized.I mention this not to encourage us now to feel sorry, as it were, forthe hardships the colonizers endured.Instead, it is important to recognize thatby inscribing Japan in the early-twentieth-century world as a so-called first-rank nation, the country s leaders necessarily set about remaking Japan fromwithin in ways that meshed with the nation s policies abroad.Japan s entirenational self-definition became that of an imperialist power, a power thateventually met gruesome defeat at home, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.In the reflexive condition of modern politics, defining a nation as an impe-rialist power meant that certain practices circled back and forth between thecountry s colonies and the mainland, all displayable amidst similar practicesaround the world.Such policies were not mirror reflections of each other, butthey were refracted and refined depending on location, budget, and person-ality, and also on international conditions such as war or anticolonial move-ments and moods.In all instances, however, colonizers exerted power bydefining themselves against the colonized; while simultaneously defining the other as dependent, they embedded the relationship as practice and fact asit took shape.Such relationships revealed themselves within Japan as withoutin the various trappings of the modern state Foucault s dispositifs such aseducation, health care, religious organization, the military, telecommunica-tions networks, museums, bureaucracy, fiscal policy, and, perhaps most tena-ciously, in law courts, police, and jails.At the beginning of the twenty-first cen-tury, we may all even have come to accept this once radical notion that the131132 Codacolonizing power also colonized itself as fairly common sense.If not com-mon sense, then, at least it is a compelling idea [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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