Mark Caprio's recent book is a wonderful addition to the field of Korean and Japanese modern history. Its appearance is particularly timely as Japan and Korea ponder the meaning of the centennial anniversary of the 1910 annexation. Caprio's focus on the ideas and practices evinced by various assimilation policies during the colonial era brings rich life to a whole array of discussions about and attempts to make Koreans Japanese.
The first section of Caprio's Japanese Assimilation Policies describes worldwide colonizing politics at the outset of the twentieth century, followed by chapters that incorporate Japan's specific history into that framework. Building on this straightforward chronological approach, Caprio zeroes in on the transformative moment in March 1919 as his touchstone and elaborates its history through a discussion of the Japanese government's response to Korea's collective outburst. He follows this with a particularly innovative and thick description of wartime conditions for colonized Koreans. In this chapter, and when discussing especially thorny terms, Caprio makes the wise decision to include many of the Japanese terms in their original, lest readers lose their bearings or wonder whether Caprio is leaving the terms at face value. To be sure, he is not, yet he is firm in urging readers to know that while many Koreans resisted the visions that the Japanese government laid out for them—made apparent through much of the discourse involved—this was the world surrounding Koreans of their day, and how they chose to confront it shaped their lives. In this vein, Caprio brings his history to a close in the postliberation era of division through an analysis of how Japanese colonialism shaped that division, as well as how it continues to pattern Korean existence to this day.
While some will want to categorize the book as either a Korean history or a Japanese history, it is truly a story in between: on the one hand, he tells of Korean lives lived, lost, and mourned, yet on the other hand, there may not be a better accounting of Goto Shimpei's colonial dreams and fantastical policies available in English.
The scope of his examples succeeds, moreover, in telling the larger history of the time in thought-provoking ways. In simplest terms, Caprio has finally accomplished what many (including myself) wanted to do yet could not quite manage: he has written a truly comparative colonial history in which Japanese Korean history becomes part of the world scene of the early twentieth century. In but one example of some splendid sentences, Caprio writes, “From the early morning hours of March 1, 1919, Japanese images of the Koreans passively becoming assimilated like the supposedly docile Scots turned into an Irish nightmare” (p. 111). Granted, Caprio's approach and learning presume a broad-minded and widely read reader, yet in doing so, he has securely brought into the forum of global debate a history that Europeanists have so often treated as an “add-on.”
Should anyone have colleagues asking which book they should consider for a section on Japanese imperialism, there is none finer than Caprio's for its involvement in big conversations, as well as for its own richness of detail. Within the field, the book should generate far-ranging discussion among researchers and graduate students, and will also be useful to students in upper-level undergraduate courses and to those teaching introductory ones. To be sure, some will fault Caprio for steering around more immediately fashionable theories in the field of Asian studies, but they would be forgetting that the study of empire itself is a theoretical approach, and that to be able to tell Japan and Korea's history within that approach—and to tell it intelligently, and not in perpetual reference to or in rather hopeless segregation from—is in fact very good history.
