Reviewed by: Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea by Albert L. Park Carl Young Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea by Albert L. Park. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 307pp. Research on Korean activism and nationalism during the Japanese colonial period is often focused on elite and urban movements. This is in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Koreans at this time still lived in rural areas, even though industrialization and urbanization was changing Korean society. Much of the research on the social and political outlook of Korean activism in colonial times also centers on the importance for Korea to not only seek independence, but also to establish an industrial capitalist economy or an industrial socialist economy as the foundation of a “modern” nation-state. Organized religion also played an important role in Korean activism and nationalism, although it is often felt that its influence declined in the 1920s and 1930s. Albert Park’s book Heaven on Earth attempts to remedy this neglect by focusing on Protestant Christian and Ch’ŏndogyo agrarian activism in colonial Korea in the 1920s and 1930s. These movements emphasized the importance of agriculture as the foundation of Korea’s economy and society and called for improvements in agricultural technology and cooperative organization of Korean agriculture as an alternative to industrialization and the social upheaval that it provoked. Park’s book is divided into two parts. The first part is made up of chapters outlining the origins of Tonghak/Ch’ŏndogyo and Protestant Christianity in Korea and their connection with social activism; economic and social changes in colonial Korea and their impact on rural society, agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization; and lastly, the origins of religious social ideology in Korea in [End Page 269] the 1920s and 1930s, especially as a response to anti-religious discourses that were gaining influence after the failure of the March 1919 independence demonstrations and the rise of secular socialist and bourgeois nationalist thought. Park uses the examples of Yi Tonhwa, a prominent Ch’ŏndogyo thinker, Hong Pyŏngsŏn of the YMCA, and the Presbyterian activist Pae Minsu to show how some religious activists reacted to the interactions of social and economic change and the place of religion in relation to modernity. These thinkers, in their different ways, came to the conclusion that modernization did not necessarily imply industrialization or secularization. Instead, a focus on cooperative organization of agriculture infused with religious principles would permit the majority of the Korean population to access the benefits of modernity while remaining in the countryside and thus reduce the social upheaval that came with industrial urbanization. The second part of the book focuses more specifically on the organization of agricultural cooperatives and campaigns of literacy and education to help promote peasant self-improvement. Denmark had become the showcase for agrarian cooperatives and the Ch’ŏndogyo-led Chosŏn nongminsa, Hong’s YMCA and Pae Minsu’s Presbyterian movement all inspired themselves from the Danish model. These movements were not necessarily against capitalist modernity, but instead proposed alternative models that would protect peasants and strengthen their village organizations and more fairly distribute profits from agriculture to producers in order to improve the lives of farmers and their villages. In this way, these cooperative movements were different from traditional agrarian movements that were based on Confucian ideology and which embraced traditional village organization as a way of fighting against capitalist economics and colonial modernization programs. Cooperative financing was also important in order to compete against banks and state funding and also to give more accessible credit to farmers. Religion was important to provide the organizational and moral glue to keep these cooperatives together. In this way, religion could show itself as an important force of social change in a modernizing society, aiming to create both new humans and new alternatives of social and economic organization. All of these organizations also focused on rural education and literacy promotion and published numerous journals and educational aids. Rural youth education was particularly important so as to educate future rural leaders and also to reduce the attractions of migration to the...