Tenkō in Korea

Abstract

Hong Jong-wook’s chapter critiques what he terms ‘the methodological and formal universality’ of postwar Japanese tenkō theories. Whilst recognizing that the theory of total war opened up new horizons for interpreting tenkō, he argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the phenomenon in Japan’s colonial territories. If class reconciliation at the heart of the empire was necessary in order to construct the system of total war, then ethnic cooperation was required throughout the colonial empire. Amongst mainland Japanese socialists, the majority of ideological conversions occurred in 1933, but at that stage there was still only a limited number of defectors in colonial Korea. Koreans may have been willing and able to renounce their ideologies, but the wall of ethnicity remained impregnable. The greater number of Korean converts appeared at the time of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, largely because the ideology of East Asian cooperation gave them hope for a solution to the issue of ethnicity. The Asian socialists had long fought the issues of ethnicity and colonization, and their decision to commit tenkō stood Asian socialism on its head. This phenomenon stood at the crossroads between the logic of resistance of the occupied race and the machinery of governance of the colonial empire.