Empire in the ordinary

The regular concerns of two Korean farmers are a microcosm of the large adjustments we underwent in the early 20th century.

A lady increases silkworms, Korea, early twentieth century. Japanese postcards were produced to showcase the changes to agriculture under colonial rule. Country-wide folks Museum of Korea

In 1919, the Korean gentleman farmer Yu Yŏnghŭi (1890-1960) wrote in his diary:

Fourth month, the 8th day. Sunny. As the day passed. The day gone by morning I went to the township workplace. I got sheets of white hybrid silkworm eggs and lower back them.

In 1925, Chŏng Kwanhae (1873-1949) recorded a similar, standard day in his lifestyle:

The second month, the 12th day. From midday it commenced to snow thru to nighttime until a person might sink to their calves … I went to meet Mr. Kim Hyŏngok on the street to Haegok [village] … I said, ‘I need to perform a mulberry seedling area however the seeds are hard to find.’ Kim stated … ‘I've a catalog. If you borrow it you may strive [to order seeds] and spot for yourself.’

Before everything look mundane and each day, these entries offer a perception of the turbulent political and social changes that characterized the late 19th and early twentieth centuries in Korean records. Following the outlet of Korean ports to new varieties of exchange and diplomatic family members in 1876, a series of wars, rebellions, and reform movements converted Korean society in a few brief decades. Annexation by way of Japan in 1910 compounded and complicated the tensions surrounding economic and social trade, as colonial regulations designed to prefer the hobbies of the Japanese empire exacerbated divisions among some of the Korean populace. Despite lasting 35 years, legacies of colonial rule continue to tell politics in the two Koreas, rising in debates over how to address questions of historic collaboration, earnings inequality, wartime trauma, and forced exertions.

Dwelling outdoors in the capital, Yu and Chŏng’s diaries offer a noticeably local, mundane perspective on life beneath colonial rule. Yu and Chŏng are in large part unremarkable figures. Though each hailed from elite lineages and acquired enough training to keep their diaries, neither became rich enough to escape the fear of money owed or a horrific harvest. Instead of discussing colonial politics or social movements, their diaries recorded the climate, their relationships with buddies, friends, and family, and the workouts of the agricultural calendar.

Nevertheless, the diaries of Yu and Chŏng are instructive exactly because of their consciousness of the everyday exercises of their authors.

Of route, Yu and Chŏng’s lives have been not untouched by means of the growth of the Japanese empire. The colonial government brought policies that prompted all factors of life in Korea. As the primary enterprise that supported over 70 percent of the populace throughout the colonial period, agriculture acquired unique interest from officials who sought to ‘enhance’ current practices and set up Korea as a profitable part of the Japanese empire. The silkworm eggs that Yu obtained from the township workplace are just one instance. In advance years, Yu had received silkworm eggs from an acquaintance in a neighboring village after listening about them from his pals. After colonial officials diagnosed sericulture as a promising industry, however, nearby government places of work have been an increasing number of energetic in promoting it – importing new silkworm breeds, encouraging the sale of cocoons, and linking farmers with agricultural technicians to supervise training and silk manufacturing. That, through 1919, Yu acquired silkworm eggs from the township office as opposed to his network of pals and buddies famous for the material enlargement of the colonial nation, with the township workplace blurring the traces between trade and manipulation. Although Yu frequently bristled in his diary on the imposition of government surveys and inspections, the township office progressively has become an crucial part of his economic existence. In later years, those connections could facilitate wartime mobilization campaigns, but from 1919 the expansion of the state appeared less as a sudden shock of foreign rule than a sluggish, grumbling redirection of assets amid Yu’s present financial sports.

As for Chŏng, the catalog endorsed by his friend might connect him to seed vendors in Tokyo – an industrial supplement to the colonial government’s efforts to popularise and distribute new seed types. The mulberry seedlings that Chŏng planned to purchase were intimately related to colonial tries to enlarge the cultivation of silkworms and, with the aid of extension, the mulberry leaves that they ate up in big portions.

Not like Yu’s foray into sericulture, Chŏng sought the mulberry seedlings of his own volition. But Chŏng’s preference to domesticate mulberry trees also speaks to the broader adjustments within the rural economic system. Following riots over high rice fees in Japan, in the Twenties the colonial government delivered bold plans to boom the production and export of Korean rice which will relieve fees for eastern purchasers. Colonial rice campaigns took the shape of massive-scale investment into irrigation facilities and the advertising of fertilizers and high-yielding seed sorts, growing rural households’ sensitivity to market prices as they observed themselves newly accountable for water charges, fertilizer purchases, and irrigation-related debts. Certainly, Chŏng defined his hobby in mulberry cultivation as an immediate consequence of the recent instability of rice agriculture: ‘Nowadays existence is getting more difficult, and farming by myself isn't always enough. Besides the primary industry, one has to even have a side enterprise.’ even as farmers have usually varied through the cultivation of multiple crops, Chŏng’s choice displays a larger shift inside the colonial rural economy, as authorities campaigns met the realities of an increasing, ever greater precarious, marketplace economic system.

Of direction, Yu and Chŏng’s diaries screen just experiences among many. But their diaries do extra than element the pervasive impact of colonial rule; they display how Yu and Chŏng understood changes to agriculture and the agricultural economic system in the context of their everyday lives. In this regard, the events that Yu and Chŏng recorded can be understood as a part of a much wider phenomenon. You engaged in sericulture, however, this drew him into an uneasy dependence on nearby authorities' workplaces. Chŏng’s hobby in mulberry cultivation turned into pushed as a great deal via the precarity of rice agriculture as it turned into a desire to relax profits. For each, the effect of colonial rule turned not usually straightforward but frequently regarded circuitously, through friends and pals, changing expenses in neighborhood markets, and interactions with township places of work and village heads. The everyday encounters that Yu and Chŏng recorded of their diaries display the complicated dynamics of the way the Japanese empire worked in practice.