Introduction: what is ‘peripheral fascism’?

The concept of fascism seems to belong to the most indefinable notions in the world of social science. Whilst the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler are commonly referred to as benchmarks of fascism, the problems persist in marking clear borders between fascism and those ideologies that predated classical fascism and heavily influenced it without fully merging with it. The boundaries between what may be judged as coming closest to the classic Italian and German models, and what can be categorized as semi-fascist or fascism-influenced regimes and/or movements, are also vague. It was commonly recognized already in the 1930s that fascism developed out of the modern European nationalist tradition. Fichtean ideas on national struggles as the primary content of history and Carlyle's ‘hero worship’ were the intellectual legacies on which fascists were successfully capitalizing.Footnote ¹ It is also clear that the nationalist cult of war sacrifice dating back to the Napoleonic wars, ‘militarised masculinity’ of the nineteenth-century European middle classes reinforced by the romantic cult of adventure, as well as the legacies of ‘volkish’ thought, with its emphasis on male bonding and racism (furnishing the ‘Volk’ with a tangible enemy within and without) all contributed to the formation of the distinctive élan of the fascist revolutions of the 1920s–1930s in Central and Southern Europe.Footnote ² However, it is obvious that it will be too teleological to regard the nineteenth-century ‘hero worship’, racism, Social Darwinism and the ‘militarised masculinity’ as fascism in an embryonic form. After all, Britain, the country which perhaps contributed most to the formation of assorted racial and Social Darwinist discourses, did not develop into a fascist regime in the end.

It may be safer to say that, whilst the late nineteenth-century nationalized vision of the world laid the foundations for both fascists and other right-wing movements of the twentieth century, the maturation of ‘real’ fascism and its coming to power depended upon a complex combination of both domestic and international factors. Among them, the failures—real and perceived—of a given country in the struggle for colonies and resources may be considered the most decisive. Thus, despite the obvious dissimilarity of the cultural background and stronger role of established bureaucracies in comparison with fascist movements from below, war-time Japan still may be classified together with Germany and Italy as a have-not nation, which developed the ideologies and forms of the social mobilization which was truly fascist in content if not always in name.Footnote ³ When Japan's best-known idealist philosopher, Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) stated in 1943 that Japan was not simply a totalitarian state (zentaishugi kokka) but also possessed the Imperial House which, being an absolute substance unifying past with future, provides the whole world with an organizing principle,Footnote ⁴ he showed that Japan's expansionist ambitions had deep roots in the ideological superstructure of the modern Japanese state. Ideological articulations of this kind made it clear that the Japanese establishment was able to develop a fascistoid ideology of cohesion and conquest with the use of indigenous, quasi-religious rhetoric. However, to which degree the right-wing ideological developments in the early 1930s Korea—reduced by that point to a Japanese colony and obviously in no position to independently mobilize itself for a fight for Lebensraum (living space)—may be connected to the world-historical phenomenon of the 1920–1930s fascist wave?

It is obvious that the colonial or semi-colonial periphery of the capitalist world-system did not provide the required type of environment for classical fascist regimes. However, it is equally obvious that ideological fashions of the world-systemic core could be quickly seized upon by peripheral elites seeking to further a variety of their own agendas, often not very dissimilar to that of the classical fascists (rabid anti-Communism is a case in point).Footnote ⁵ Of course, inasmuch as the agendas of various peripheral fascist and fascistoid movements and regimes were formed both by European examples and precedents and by local circumstances—Chilean fascists of the 1930s were, for instance, avowedly Catholic and anti-imperialist, in strong contrast with their German and Italian mentors, but were otherwise just as fond of violence, anti-individualism, anti-Marxism and the corporatist state—they never became the exact copies of their core prototypes. That, however, did not necessarily mean any lack of ideological authenticity on their part. At least in the case of many Latin American fascist movements and semi-fascist corporatist states of the 1930s and 1940s, the difference lay rather in socio-economic circumstances than in the tone of the aggressively militaristic and anti-liberal ideology.Footnote ⁶ European fascism could hardly be a realistic model to closely imitate for the nationalist movements in the colonies. There was little sense in attacking liberalism and democracy under the colonial regimes lacking both, and the idea of ‘nation as the highest and only value’ might ring hollow in the places where political nations were still to be built. However, the fascistic spirit undoubtedly influenced some right-wing mass movements in the most politicized colonies in the 1920s–1930s, India's Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers’ Union), founded in 1925 with the stated aim ‘to serve the nation and its people in the form of God—Mother India’ being a good example.Footnote ⁷ In fact, this creation of Keshava Baliram Hedgewar (1889–1940), being a mass grassroots movement with strong emphasis on a strictly authoritarian mode of organization and enemy picture of Muslims as an essentialized ‘threat against Indian identity and culture’, might, to a certain degree, fall into the same category as the fascist and semi-fascist mass movements in Europe or Latin America during the 1920s and 1930s, notwithstanding the limitations put upon its activities by India's colonial situation.

However, the case of the Korean right-wing intelligentsia during the 1920s–1930s seems to differ cardinally even from India. Whilst the—mostly Communist—left had made by the early 1930s considerable progress in penetrating even rural districts of the country in the form of ‘red’ peasant unions and associations,Footnote ⁸ the ideological influence of the bourgeois right wing was relatively limited. From 1923–1924 its newspapers and journals had been calling Gandhi a ‘saintly hero’ (sǒng'ung) and admiring his ability to mobilize a population for disciplined political action,Footnote ⁹ but they were neither able nor willing to exercise any comparable influence upon Korea's own masses. The goal of many right-wing nationalists was ‘self-strengthening’ (sillyǒk yangsǒng), and that made them willing to collaborate with the colonial masters rather than oppose them as long as colonialism adapted a ‘developmental’ colour and was seen as an agent of ‘civilization’. Thus, instead of attempting a mass political mobilization for the anti-colonial cause, the fascism-influenced Korean right-wingers of the early 1930s were more interested in demobilising them politically—that is, in checking and counteracting the leftist grassroots movements. They often attempted to channel the energies of lower-ranked intellectuals such as teachers, petty civil servants and students, into the field of culture and identity, be it veneration of Korea's national heroes like Korea's mythical progenitor Tan'gun, or sixteenth-century admiral Yi Sunsin, or mass literacy campaigns. Unlike the wartime ‘total mobilization’ period between 1938–1939 and 1945, when the absolute majority of the prominent right-wing intellectuals, not always completely willingly, had to publicly identify the Korean nation as part of the ‘greater Yamato (Japanese) race’, the fascism-influenced nationalism of the early 1930s still remained ‘Korean’, but mostly emphatically apolitical. The fascism-influenced writings emphasized the ‘reconstruction’ of individual and society, the ‘beauty’ of Korea's ‘spirit’ and ‘tradition’ and/or the evils of individualism and cosmopolitanism, but not the political mobilization of a Korean nation in any way independent of the Japanese authorities. In this aspect, the contemporaneous left-wing critics might have been right in speaking about a fascism with a colonial deformation—that is, about an attempt by a hopelessly dependent colonial bourgeoisie to emulate much stronger capitalist classes of the independent nation-states. As the Korean fascism of the early 1930s was definitely an intellectual tendency rather than a political or social movement, it possibly will not qualify as ‘fascism’ in a narrower, classical meaning of the word. But the fascistic fashion of the early 1930s was still important. It brought to many Korean bourgeois intellectuals stronger sympathies to the actions of the extreme nationalists and militarists of Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as much more open hostility towards Marxism and Communism. These attitudes were important in inducing later voluntary cooperation with the wartime Japanese propaganda. Then, the injection of the anti-liberal and anti-individualist values Korea's educated society received in the 1930s may have influenced the post-colonial developments in the society and culture of both North and South Korea.

Controversies on fascism in 1930s Korea

The controversies on fascism that had swept Europe and reached Japan soon after the Italian ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922 which handed power to Mussolini (1883–1945) were relatively late to reach colonial Korea. True, Mussolini's rise to power was duly reported. The émigré Tongnip Sinmun, published in Shanghai by Korea's nationalist and anti-Japanese Provisional Government, quickly reported in November 1922 on the ‘success of Mussolini's politics of naked force’, characterizing Mussolini's policies as extremist and his party as ‘extreme right wing’.Footnote ¹⁰ Amongst the newspapers inside Korea itself, Tong'a Ilbo was quick to report on the clashes between Communists and fascists in Italy as a whole, and particularly in Rome,Footnote ¹¹ and then gave a detailed account of Mussolini's takeover, somewhat exaggerating the strength and influence of the fascist forces.Footnote ¹² After this, however, most reporting on Italy in Korean colonial newspapers was concentrated on Mussolini's foreign policy. The domestic socio-political situation was mostly overlooked.

Reporting on German fascists was very sparse until the very end of the 1920s.Footnote ¹³ The significance of the upsurge of the European extreme right capitalizing on fears of the Bolshevik world revolution was not fully understood by Korean intellectuals until the late 1920s. The early and mid-1920s were a time when the popularity of the socialist (communist) and anarchist thought among the Korean radicals was matched by the heightened interest in democracy and individualism among conservatives. Korea's national bourgeoisie and moderate intellectuals were keenly aware that they had to present Korea's image to the world in which the liberal-democratic states of Western Europe and the United States of America had just won a victory over the Central European empires. They were also pinning their hopes on the ‘Imperial democrats’ of Taishō Japan, some of whom, like Yoshino Sakuzō (1878–1933), were proposing a sort of home rule for colonized Korea.Footnote ¹⁴ For example, one of the central Protestant activists in Korea at that time—who was to develop into a fascistic thinker in the mid-1930s—Sin Hǔngu (Cynn, Hugh Heung-wo: 1883–1959), praised ‘Christian liberty’ in his English writings of the early 1920s:

‘Individual’ and ‘individualism’ became such popular buzzwords that one of monthly Kaebyǒk's more traditional articles, commemorating ‘Mr. Kim Okkyun (1851–1894), posthumously honoured as Ch'ungdal-kong, a hero of the Korean nation’, started its laudation of Kim by saying that ‘in our times when individualism and democracy are so prominent, it looks as if people will soon stop talking about heroes’.Footnote ¹⁶ Glorification of nationalist heroes never stopped, of course, but the anxiety about such a possibility is noteworthy.

Even those right-wingers who continued to adhere to the Social Darwinist collectivist ideals of sacrificing oneself for national/state survival (inherited from the ‘enlightenment’ discourses of the 1900s–1910s) were often carefully balancing their praise for collective cohesion with the paeans to liberalism and democracy. For example, Yi Kwangsu's (1892–1950) seminal Minjok Kaejoron (Treatise on National Regeneration, first published in Kaebyǒk, May 1922) contrasted the semi-eternal ‘longevity of the collectives’ (nations and churches) to the brief lifespan of individuals and exhorted its readers to offer their utmost self-sacrifice for the sake of the Korean nation's reform and survival. However, at the same time it idealized the ‘national qualities of the Anglo-Saxons’, primarily their ‘love of freedom and practical, enterprising spirit’. Yi, in full accordance with the commonplaces of the contemporaneous conservative liberalism, understood Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism as a fruit of gradual, non-revolutionary development, fully based on pragmatism and ideally balancing the respect towards the privacy of individuals with ‘the spirit of service to states, various communities and voluntary groups’.Footnote ¹⁷ Social Darwinism remained the staple menu of right-wing discourse throughout the 1920s, but it was general practice to put it under some liberal dressing.

The extreme-right discourses were not welcome in such a milieu—so far. It is not that Korea's right-wing nationalist moderates were alarmed by the growing popularity of communist and anarchist ideas among the educated youth and their influences upon mass movements: in colonial Korea of the 1920s, where the underground communist cells were hunted down by the Japanese police and denied any right to the lawful public representation, the local bourgeoisie was much less interested in militant anti-Communism than its counterparts in many European countries. In fact, even among the Korean Christians directly challenged by the communist anti-religious propaganda, the dominant response was instead a deeper profession of interest in moderate Christian socialism and social gospel, as well as in the establishment of basic welfare provision for the workers and in ‘labour-capital cooperation’, than any surge in confrontational anti-Communism.Footnote ¹⁸ Such well-known Pyongyang Protestant leaders as Cho Mansik (1883–1950), while not openly becoming Christian socialists themselves, were explicitly sharing Christian socialist concerns about mass poverty and social disparities.Footnote ¹⁹ While the radicals certainly were not tolerated by the Japanese police, the 1920s are still worth remembering as the epoch of remarkable ideological tolerance within Korea's educated society.

The onset of the Great Depression in autumn 1929 had a shock impact on the whole yen zone economy, Korea included. While the impact upon the industrial economy was somewhat limited in comparison with Europe and the United States of America, agriculture was hit hardest. Gross domestic product in the agricultural sector in Japan dropped 12 per cent between 1928 and 1933. In Korea, the main rice supplier to Japan, rice prices dropped by almost 60 per cent in the period September 1929 to January 1931, but had recovered fully by 1935.Footnote ²⁰ This blow to Korea's rural economy led to an explosive growth in peasant resistance. The number of participants in tenancy disputes almost tripled between 1928 and 1930, from 4,863 to 13,012 persons. This upsurge in resistance led to the direct legal interventions of the colonial state in the rural land tenure relationship. The first Tenancy Regulation Law was promulgated by the Government-General as early as in December 1932.Footnote ²¹ Interventionist, rather than liberal, state was now high on the agenda in Korea. For the Japanese industrial and financial sectors, direct imperialist expansion into China was one solution to the perils of the worldwide crisis. It was also a solution in synchronization with the general trend towards establishing closed regional economical blocks.Footnote ²² During the first five years of the puppet Manzhouguo state (founded in north-eastern China in February 1932), Japanese investment there totalled 1.2 billion yen. It was a figure close to 1.75 billion yen invested into the region by Japanese capitalists during the 25 years-long period before the aggression.Footnote ²³

The aggression against China profited the Korea-based business community as well. Exports from Korea to Manchuria increased ten-fold during the decade 1929–1939. Japanese entrepreneurs, who dominated most capital and technology-intensive sectors in Korea, profited most. However, some native industrialists, for example, brothers Kim Sŏngsu (1891–1955) and Kim Yŏnsu (1896–1979), the majority shareholders both in the Tong'a Ilbo and Kyŏngsŏng Pangjik textile company, were able also to supply their production in large quantities into occupied parts of China.Footnote ²⁴ During the 1930s, Manchuria was a favourite place for tourist outings of the Korean bourgeoisie and wealthier intellectuals, faithfully following the fashion for Manchuria tourism in Japan itself.Footnote ²⁵ Also, Korea was rapidly industrializing, and this industrialization was to a large degree driven by war-generated demand. The share of war-related industrial goods in overall Korean production jumped from 9 per cent in 1930 to 31 per cent in 1940.Footnote ²⁶ While open favouritism by the colonial state towards the metropolitan capital posed a problem for Korea's native industrialists, the activist militarized state, bent on outward expansion, benefitted them as well. In addition to providing opportunities for further industrial expansion, yen-zone trade and investment, militarist state was also seen as the provider of stability. It was a bulwark against discontent from beneath and against ‘Soviet communist threat’ outside. The pace of Soviet industrialization and militarization was well covered in the Korean press,Footnote ²⁷ and ‘Soviet threat’ perceptions in the 1930s differed sufficiently from the more relaxed attitudes of the 1920s. As a result of all these developments, fascism started to be viewed with much deeper interest by right-wingers in Korea from 1929 onward. This interest was in many cases favourable.

One of the first Korean Protestant leaders to turn his attention towards the Italian events and to interpret them sympathetically was Yun Ch'iho (1865–1945). He was one of the first Koreans who received a regular American university education and to accept the Social Darwinist ‘might is right’ thesis, in a peculiar combination with Christian beliefs.Footnote ²⁸ On having read Mussolini's My Autobiography Footnote ²⁹ in early 1929, Yun Ch'ho wrote in his English diary on 11 February 1929:

As Yun learned more about the oppressive side of the Italian strongman's internal policies, his fascination gradually cooled down. Nevertheless, true to his Social Darwinist beliefs, Yun was ready to defend Mussolini's aggressions as late as summer 1935:

An approving attitude towards the Japanese invasion of Manchuria easily translated into an approval for the invasion of Ethiopia based upon Yun's long-term credo, the ‘survival of the fittest’ thesis as applied to human societies.

Both Hitler and Mussolini were synonyms for ‘dictator’ in Yun's diary. Dictatorship of such a kind was understood as somewhat unpleasant, but at the same time an inescapable phenomenon in societal life. However, the attitude taken by Yun towards Hitler was markedly more critical. Hitler's overambitious conquest plans were judged by Yun to be too reckless and dangerous for the whole non-communist world facing a communist threat. Already the first mention of Hitler in Yun's diary on 16 May 1933 was strongly disapproving:

It looks as if German fascists’ pronounced anti-intellectualism was frightening to Yun Ch'iho as an accomplished, self-conscious intellectual. The fascist treatment of Jews, in turn, reminded Yun about Koreans’ own fate. The fate of stateless Jews was often compared with the Koreans’ own colonial captivity by many colonial Christian intellectuals, Yun included.Footnote ³³ However, Yun's deep aversion towards Hitler—a ‘modern times’ emperor Qin Shi Huang’, a ‘hungry wolf’, ‘mad dog’ and ‘man-slaughterer’—notwithstanding, his hostility towards what he routinely calls ‘beastly Russia’ or ‘beastly Bolshevism’ seems to have been much stronger. When Yun compares Hitler's and Stalin's totalitarian state terror, it is Russia he wishes to see vanquished first:

Yun's class hostility towards ‘barbarian Bolshevism’—that is, anti-Communism in the classical sense of the word—obviously overlaps here with older resentments towards what Yun perceived as Russia's aggressive bullying of the Korean monarchy in 1896–1904.Footnote ³⁵ While Hitler-Stalin's 23 August 1939 Non-aggression Pact alerted Yun to the ‘increased Russian threat towards Japan’,Footnote ³⁶ the news of Hitler's aggression against Russia again led him to think that the Soviet, and not the German victory was the real danger for Japan and Korea:

In the beginning Yun apparently believed that the German blitzkrieg was to succeed and considered any resistance to Hitler futile.Footnote ³⁸ However, the German defeat in Stalingrad frightened him with a perspective of a future Stalin's attack against Japan:

Since Bolshevik Russia dominated Yun's personal political demonology, he was then waiting for Hitler's defeat in anguish. He was prophetically predicting that a victory over Germany would entail a Soviet march upon Imperial Japan and that the fortunes of Korea's dominant class and its Protestant churches, that he himself belonged to, were then bound to decline under the rule of the Soviet ‘egalitarianists’ and ‘atheists’. Korea's foremost senior Protestant intellectual of the 1930s and early 1940s, Yun seems to have sincerely abhorred what he termed ‘Hitler's totalitarian rule’ and ‘war-for-the-war-sake policy’. However, those anti-totalitarian sentiments were essentially stifled by his rabid anti-communism. Even after the Allied landing in Calabria and Italy's surrender, Yun revealed in his diary entry of 10 September 1943 his continuing admiration for Mussolini, the ‘great and good man who saved Italy from Bolshevism’. At the same time he marked his disapproval of Italian fascism's ‘excessive’ territorial aspirations.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘Salvation from Bolshevism’ was seemingly a good enough legitimation for an Italian-type fascist state in his eyes.

Yun's diary is a private record. It gives us an uncommon opportunity to observe changes in the inner world of one of the most prominent Korean intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. However, it did not exert any influence on the contemporaries, although Yun's public anti-communist posture and tendency to view fascism as a lesser evil compared with Bolshevism undoubtedly did become a reference point for his conservative Protestant milieu. Yet much stronger influence on the attitudes of educated society was exerted by newspapers, especially by Tong'a Ilbo. It expanded its length to ten pages by September 1933, printing 31,666 copies daily by 1936Footnote ⁴¹ and was indeed a profitable capitalist enterprise, its net profits totalling 6,962 yen for the financial year 1933, and 5,087 yen for the financial year 1934.Footnote ⁴²Tong'a Ilbo editorials may be considered a good indication of what Korea's fledgling capitalist class, as represented by Tong'a Ilbo shareholders, wished to make into society's hegemonic ideology (in Gramscian terms).

A cursory analysis of the content of the early 1930s’ editorials shows that in Korea, as elsewhere, the Depression shook to its very grounds the belief in the possibility of crisis-free, stable, capitalist development. The 1920s liberal faith was now in shambles. The very paragon of the ‘free-loving, individualist Anglo-Saxon spirit’ eulogized earlier by Yi Kwangsu and Sin Hǔngu, the United States of America, were by 1930 exactly in the epicentre of the worldwide economical and social storm. A 17 December 1930 editorial in Tong'a Ilbo—judged too radical and prohibited by the Japanese censors—asked why the economy of a World War victor, America, was as badly damaged by the crisis as the economy of the vanquished, reparations-ridden Germany. It also questioned the long-term sustainability of the relatively robust economical performance of France, and emphasized that the only industrial country where unemployment had declined and not increased, was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with its planned economy.Footnote ⁴³

Tong'a Ilbo was edited by Song Chinu (1890–1945), a relatively liberal and thoroughly business-minded graduate of Meiji University. Once in the 1920s he showed some sympathetic interest towards socialist trendsFootnote ⁴⁴ and even advocated the abolition of the death penalty.Footnote ⁴⁵ He was not, of course, going to accept the decline and fall of liberal capitalism as irreversible. After having seen Adolf Hitler become German Chancellor and the Reichstag burnt down, Tong'a Ilbo entitled its 29 March 1933 editorial ‘Dictatorship and Emergency’ (Tokchae wa pisangsi). It was asserted there that, although the worldwide decline of parliamentarianism was caused by its own ‘corruption and inherent contradictions’, there were contradictions inherent in dictatorial rule as well. It might continue for some time, driven by the Depression-generated economical dislocations, but it was not going to last forever.Footnote ⁴⁶Tong'a Ilbo was shocked enough by Hitler's official anti-Semitism to publish an editorial on 3 September 1933 strongly sympathetic to the Jewish cause. It was entitled ‘Plight of the Jews’ (Yut'aein ǔi piae) and ascribed the plight of the persecuted Jewish people to the absence of a Jewish state. At the same time it wisely cautioned that British-sponsored mass migration of the European Jews into Palestine might in the end provoke bitter hostility on the part of the Arab population and lead to ‘tragic enmity between the two weaker peoples’: the Jews and Arabs.Footnote ⁴⁷

But with the beginning of the Japanese aggression in north-eastern China and general retreat of liberalism in metropolitan Japanese politics, Tong'a Ilbo also began a gradual—if partial—revision of its erstwhile editorial line. From 1931 onwards, many of its editorials on abstract subjects started to invoke a sort of Confucianized Social Darwinism that was popular in the ‘enlightenment’ press and journals in the 1900s–1910s. It was a moralistic interpretation of the ‘might is right’ doctrine, which saw ‘ethical strength’ as an element of ‘might’. The 1 February 1932 editorial, ‘Source of strength’ (Yǒk ǔi wǒnch’ǒn), stated that, together with various kinds of ‘practical strength’ (such as physical strength or military might), the ‘moral strength’ (todǒngnyǒk—loyalty to a group, truthfulness to one's principles, etc.) was an important component of the ‘vital force’ (saengmyǒngnyǒk) that supposedly sustains both individuals and nations.Footnote ⁴⁸ The 3 September 1932 editorial, ‘Egoism and Social Consciousness’ (Igijuǔi wa sahoe ǔisik), castigated Koreans for allegedly resembling Chinese and Jews in being too egoistic and uninterested in common well-being. Soon, the 8 September 1932 editorial, ‘Struggle for survival and nation’ (Saengjon kyǒngjaeng kwa minjok), bluntly asserted that the Kropotkinian ideas of mutual aid as the driving force beyond evolution were completely wrong. Since the principle ‘survival of the fittest’ remained ‘scientific truth’, every Korean was asked to contribute to the cause of ‘national survival’ by strengthening one's muscles or getting rich ‘in the name of nation’.Footnote ⁴⁹

By the end of 1932, the crudely Social Darwinist and racist content of some editorials started to closely resemble the topics developed by the contemporaneous European far right. The 26 December 1932 editorial, pompously entitled ‘Life and the Guiding Principle’ (Saenghwal kwa chido wǒlli), contrasted ‘civilized European and Asian peoples’ and the ‘uncivilized others’. It assured readers that the difference between the former and the latter, ‘partly conditioned by hereditary discrepancy in abilities, partly by variations in the cultural levels of those races’, lay in the degree to which ‘the whole national life’ was controlled by a uniform set of ‘guiding principles’. Furthermore, the 27 December editorial, ‘The Guiding Principles of the Korean Nation’ (Chosǒn Minjok ǔi chido wǒlli), proposed that Koreans return to the ‘ancient hwarang spirit of sacrifice in the name of the state, resembling Japan's bushido’, eschew their familial attachments and wholeheartedly put themselves into the service of the ‘big I’—that is, the nation.Footnote ⁵⁰ While Tong'a Ilbo editorials on the international topics retained a degree of their erstwhile liberal leanings, exhortations towards ‘Korean people’ were gradually returning to the 1900–1910s Social Darwinist formulae. Some pieces were going even further, towards an increased emphasis on ‘racial differences’ and the cult of ‘total self-sacrifice in the nation's name’.

Finally, in the 29 March 1934 editorial tellingly entitled ‘What Comes after Liberalism’ (Chayujuǔi ǔi twi e ol cha), United States President Roosevelt was simultaneously called ‘dictatorial’ and ‘not dictatorial enough to subdue the Depression’. Liberalism in both economy and political life was effectively pronounced dead for good.Footnote ⁵¹ Even after this, Tong'a Ilbo editorials occasionally showed sympathy with Ethiopia's desperate attempts to resist the Italian invasion (4 May 1936) and with the persecuted European Jews (4 September 1938).Footnote ⁵² However, the advent of post-liberal political and social institutions and doctrines were more or less accepted as fait accompli, and in many cases cheered. After Japan began a full-scale invasion of China on 7 July 1937, Tong'a Ilbo, threatened with heavy sanctions for insubordination, began calling the Japanese army ‘our army’ (agun). From late July it practically turned into a propagandist tool of the Japanese administrative and military machine.Footnote ⁵³

Neither Yun Ch'iho nor Song Chinu sympathized with fascism full-heartedly. However, some right-wing ideologues of colonial Korea went much further in identifying themselves with the extreme right-wing trends of contemporaneous Europe. The most famous name on the list of colonial Korea's self-styled fascist theoreticians is unquestionably that of Yi Kwangsu. He entered Tong'a Ilbo as an irregular staff member in May 1923, served there as managing editor between April 1925 and October 1927 and then again between December 1929 and August 1933. Then he was headhunted by Chosǒn Ilbo, where he became a vice-director.Footnote ⁵⁴ Many of the Tong'a Ilbo editorials of the early 1930s mentioned above—such as ‘Life and the Guiding Principle’ or ‘The Guiding Principles of the Korean Nation’—vividly show the imprint of Yi Kwangsu's benchmark Social Darwinist nationalism and his cult of ancient Korea's ‘war-like, manly spirit’. It is not fully implausible that some of these pieces were penned by Yi Kwangsu himself. However, in his lengthier treatises published in the journals of opinion, as well as in some literary works of the 1920s and early 1930s, Yi Kwangsu more clearly and sharply articulated his views on ‘leadership’, the ‘virtues of obedience’ and the ‘dangers of communism’ than he did in the unsigned editorials of Tong'a Ilbo that he might have penned or influenced. Even in the beginning of the 1920s, when he still was seemingly considering the Anglo-Saxon liberal democracies to be the ideals of ‘civilized statehood’, the basics of his worldview remained solidly Social Darwinist. They were continuously strengthened through further study of foreign Social Darwinist ideologues.

Among Yi's particular favourites in the early 1920s was Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931). The first part of the fourth chapter of his 1895 classic, La psychologie des foules, was translated by Yi,Footnote ⁵⁵ obviously from the 1915 Japanese translation,Footnote ⁵⁶ as Yi never learned French and, having studied for several years in Tokyo, mastered Japanese comparably better than English. The tone of Yi's writings in the early 1920s indicates also his familiarity with another book by Le Bon available in Japanese by that time, namely La revolution française et la psychologie des revolutions.Footnote ⁵⁷ Le Bon, an elitist Social Darwinist, a staunch believer in the ‘racial minds’ and different ‘racial qualities’ of different peoples and a life-long opponent of any movements from below, ascribed much of the violence of the French Revolution to what he considered the ‘savage nature of the crowd’ and its ‘gullibility and tendency to be manipulated by power-hungry demagogues’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Like Le Bon himself, Yi Kwangsu applied crowd manipulation theory, first and foremost, to the socialist movement. While in his writings of the early 1920s Yi Kwangsu—like many moderate right-wingers—mostly scolded the Left for ‘incitement to reckless violence’,Footnote ⁵⁹ by the beginning of the 1930s his anti-communism had acquired a distinct nationalistic flavour.

In his article on the basic tasks of the ‘national movement’ written in the wake of Japanese aggression in Manchuria, Yi began by pouring scorn upon the ‘Marxists’. He regarded them as a ‘slavish people who shun the very word “nation” and worship Soviet Russia just as [Korean Neo-Confucians] before them called Ming China their fatherland’. Yi asserted that he was prepared, in principle, to tolerate them just as he tolerated various universalistic religions (Buddhism, Christianity) once they were ‘Koreanized’ enough. The precondition, however, was that they would acknowledge the primacy of nation, which Yi termed ‘the eternal entity’. Otherwise, they would become ‘sinners to their nation’. In addition to this, Yi proposed a positive programme which obviously was meant to diminish the leftist influence upon Korean masses. It mainly consisted of literacy campaigns, the ‘enlightenment movement by the national intelligentsia centered on educating the people into loving the whole of [the] Korean nation more than themselves and sacrificing themselves for the community’, and the organization of various (financial and consumer) cooperatives.Footnote ⁶⁰ This part was largely built on the experiences of the YMCA-sponsored ‘rural reconstruction movement’. It was launched in 1925 and focused especially, besides the educational projects, on spreading the small-scale mutual credit societies and consumer cooperatives among the poorer peasants who had no recourse to mainstream banking or credit system. Interestingly enough, the undisputed leader of this movement, Sin Hǔngu, still outwardly a liberal by the beginning of Japan's aggression in Manchuria, was to become one of Korea's ‘Christian fascist’ organizers in the mid-1930s.Footnote ⁶¹

What was the theoretical background of Yi Kwangsu's passionate anti-communism? Having become a nationalist Social Darwinist already in the early 1910s, Yi believed that the fates of nationals fully depended on the fortunes of their states. Once a state was either weak or gone, its nationals were doomed.Footnote ⁶² On top of this, Yi was influenced by An Ch'angho's (1878–1938) beliefs in the ‘gradual development of national strength’ and the ‘moral regeneration of the Koreans’ while working for the Shanghai Provisional Government in 1919–1921. He counted himself among An's disciples until the very end of his life. As An's acolyte, he organized the nationalists from Pyongyang and its vicinities (his and An's native area) into a Moral Cultivation Society (Suyang tong'uhoe, launched on 7 January 1926 in Yi's Seoul house). It was to function as a domestic branch of An's American-based Hǔngsadan (Young Korea Academy).Footnote ⁶³ Positioning himself as a loyal propagandist and popularizer of An's vision, Yi showed the keenest interest in its moral side and defined An's ethics as that of self-sacrificial national devotion. In an open letter to An he exhorted Koreans to eschew personal enmities and ‘passionately love’ each other, love their jobs and work commitments, and also love their nation as a whole and put the self-sacrificial service to it above ‘egoistic individualism’.Footnote ⁶⁴ As ‘love to the nation, love to the nationals’ became Yi's motto, the ‘materialists’ were derisively referred to as those who ‘view the issue of stomach as the only content of a human life’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Class struggle was thus interpreted as the egoistic assertion of ‘small-group interests’ over greater national ones, that is, as essentially a continuation of ‘egoistic individualism’ on a ‘small-group’ level.Footnote ⁶⁶

On the opposite side of what he recognized as despicably mundane demand for better living conditions, he found an ‘ideal world of love, beauty, fascination and deep sentimental excitement (kamdong)’—the values, authentic literature, in his opinion, had to cling to.Footnote ⁶⁷ And the most exciting sight, the highest expression of love and ethical beauty was for him an obedient, hard-working cow, who ‘takes its heavy yoke for the sake of the humans and tills the fields for them, just like a lofty patriot or a man of religion sacrificing themselves for the sake of humanity. . . and after being slaughtered, gives its flesh and blood to its loved ones, on the highest level of sanctity’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the very end, the patriotic ‘love’ ideal translated into a consistent animosity towards any attempts to articulate any demands on any level either below or above the sacrosanct nation—be it at a personal, class, or universal level. Another conclusion was the cult of ‘ultimate sacrifice’—highly aestheticized ideal of life and death for the sake of nation, which by the beginning of the 1930s was for Yi more or less equivalent to the Korean bloodline (chosǒn hyǒlt'ong) and the membership in the Korean language community, as well as with the subjective ‘loyalty to the Korean people’.Footnote ⁶⁹

By emphasizing An Ch'angho's ideas of ‘unity and sacrifice’ and further aestheticizing and romanticizing the ‘love-induced sacrifice for the sake of nation’, Yi could achieve two objectives simultaneously. First, the appeal to the ‘national’ could legitimize the market-driven activities by Yi and his employers and sponsors in Korea's biggest commercial newspapers. A bestselling writer, he himself confessed, after all, that one of the reasons he continued writing for so long was the need to earn his leaving.Footnote ⁷⁰ Business was elevated in An's and Yi's ideological schemes from simple profit-making into a vehicle for ‘cultivating national strength and realising the mutual love between the nationals’. In this respect, Yi's preaching of ‘love and sacrifice’ may be considered a seed of nascent Korean capitalism's hegemonic ideology. Second, Social Darwinist belief in the ruthless law of ‘survival of the fitness’ could acquire a sort of ‘human face’ once the ‘competition for survival’ was to happen between states and nations, not between private individuals. Individuals, on the contrary, had to cultivate high ethical qualities, such as ‘sacrificial spirit’, in order to ensure not only their personal survival, but also the ‘life and glory’ of their national communities. In this way, Yi's ethics and aesthetics of ‘love and sacrifice’ were essentially an attempt to build up a capitalist modernity project without capitalist market ethics. In such a project, the profit motive would be veiled by the pathos of semi-religious nationalist rhetoric. Such an attempt was structurally similar to the projects of the contemporaneous European extreme right, and closely paralleled—being also partly influenced by—the ‘national community’ visions of the Japanese right wing of the 1920s and early 1930s.Footnote ⁷¹

Yi's eugenic musings on ‘improving the secondary qualities of the Korean people’, as well as his combination of an elitist top-down view of ‘enlightenment’ and statist nationalistic disdain for the individual or class rights and interests sparked manifold controversies from the early 1920s onward. The Left was, naturally enough, in the vanguard of Yi's critics. One of the first critics was Pak Yǒnghǔi (1901–?), a young poet with strong communist (in the mid-1920s, even somewhat ultra-leftist) leanings, who was one of the Korean Federation of Proletarian Artists (KAPF, Korea Artista Proleta Federatio) founding members in 1925. In 1926, he accused Yi of formulating ‘Korean-ness’ (chosǒnjǒgin kǒt) in a prejudiced way. According to Pak, Yi was guilty of overemphasizing the ‘effeminate’, defeatist qualities of the Korean past and of purposefully overlooking the present class struggles. Yi's emphasis upon the ‘tragic beauty of Korea’, ‘Korean sadness’ and his interest in decadent motives, declared Pak, was nothing more than just a reflection of decadent bourgeois desires.Footnote ⁷²

While Pak's application of class theory to his literary criticism seems to be too simplistic, his comments on the highly subjective and artificial nature of what Yi constructed as ‘Korean-ness’ are undoubtedly worthy of being taken seriously, even by contemporary researchers. It failed to impress Li, however. Undaunted by criticisms and definitely aware of the general turn to the right in post-Depression Japanese and world politics, in July 1931 Yi published a brief, but very meaningful piece on ‘leadership’. A short semi-academic treatise (one of the writing styles in which Yi excelled), the piece contained a proposal to reshape colonial Korea's right-wing politics and change their content. Viewing the whole historical process as a story of collective life and struggles, Yi contended that every meaningful collective (political party or church) should have a leader who would serve as the ‘embodiment of its basic doctrines’. Such a leader would earn the unchallenged loyalty of the members by demonstrating the ‘highest moral qualities’. ‘Bravery and the ability to calmly accept death’ were, of course, among the most cardinal ‘virtues of the leader’. The rank-and-file members, in turn, should reciprocate the leader's self-sacrificial leadership by ‘obeying the leader, helping the leader and loving the leader’. Their ‘joyful obedience’ (yǒlbok) was regarded by Yi as a major feature of a healthy collective life.

The leadership position in an organization corresponded, according to Yi, to the position of the ‘leading group’ in relation to the whole nation. Together with dictatorial parties—Fascists in Italy and the Communist Party in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—America's Republicans and Democrats were also on Yi's list of ‘leading groups’ of the world. However, he proposed that, in case a nation had two or more ‘leading groups’, the strongest among them was to be charged with the ‘national leadership’ task. As usual in Yi's writings, Koreans were mercilessly accused of an inability to select the right leaders and to follow them. The all-Korean confederation of left and right-wing groups, Sin'ganhoe, which had just disbanded in May 1931, was reprimanded too for its presumed lack of an authoritative leader.Footnote ⁷³ It is well known that, unlike some of his colleagues from the Moral Cultivation Society—notably, the ambitious Columbian University graduate, Dr Cho Pyǒng'ok (1894–1960; he was to become the liberal oppositional candidate for South Korean presidency in 1960)—Yi Kwangsu and other members of Tong'a Ilbo's inner circle did not participate in Sin'ganhoe activities. They rejected any cooperation with the Left, even inside a ‘pan-Korean organization for national self-expression’ framework,Footnote ⁷⁴ so the criticism of Sin'ganhoe is hardly surprising. It looks as if Yi might have viewed his own organization, the Moral Cultivation Society, as a prototype for the future ‘leading group’ of the Korean nation. He could have thought of An Ch'angho and himself, as An's best-known domestic disciple, as the candidates for ‘national leadership’. Otherwise, he might be exhorting Korea's nationalist right to build a unified pan-national organization on Sin'ganhoe's ruins.

Yi's ‘leaderism’ provoked an immediate critical response from the Left. Only two months later, Korea's veteran socialist theoretician Kim Myǒngsik (1891–1943), Yi's fellow Waseda alumnus (Kim entered Waseda in 1915, Yi—in 1916), launched a broadside against Yi. Having drawn a strict distinction between ‘leadership’ (chido) voluntarily followed by the members of the same class sharing the same interests, and ‘rule’ (chibae) violently imposed by one class upon another, he maintained that to speak of ‘national leadership’ is a self-contradiction. A ‘nation’ consists of the rulers and ruled, and the submission of the latter to the former can never be fully voluntarily. It always requires an element of coercion. In Kim's opinion, Yi's phrases about ‘national leadership’ simply veiled the intention of Korea's ruling groups—‘the minority of large landowners, bureaucrats, men of free professions,. . . .and the urban bourgeoisie’—to forcibly impose their will upon the dominated majority. Defining the nationalists who chose to participate in Sin'ganhoe as Korea's Jacobins, Kim called Yi a ‘Girondist’. He also reminded Yi that those to the right of the Jacobins might be classified, under certain circumstances, as ‘white reactionaries’. On a personal level, Yi was charged with ‘trying to become both Shakespeare and Caesar’—that is, combining literary work with a particularly dictatorial sort of politics.Footnote ⁷⁵ On having been confronted with a public retort by Yi, Kim penned a new piece, in which Yi was unambiguously tied to the rising fascist tide worldwide.

In this new criticism of Yi, Kim defined the present times—the early 1930s—as the epoch of ‘new absolutism’. Crisis-ridden capitalism was propped up by fascist dictatorships, traditional bourgeois democracy was disintegrating and once progressive nationalist movements, like China's Guomindang or India's Gandhism, were either degrading into dictatorships or losing influence. That was why Yi was increasingly focusing on ‘strength’; but his understanding of ‘strength’ was completely ahistorical. According to Kim, the strength progressive forces drew from the fact they followed the laws of historical evolution, was qualitatively different from the ‘rude force’ employed by their reactionary opponents. Kim viewed Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863–1938) as the model of a fascistic author which Yi followed. However, he added that, unlike the fighter pilot and daredevil D'Annunzio, Yi was nothing other than a literary weakling worshipping ‘strength’ at his writing desk—and that reflected the pathetic nature of fascism in colonized Korea. Confronting Yi's ‘hero-worship’ with Plekhanov's orthodox Marxist views on the role of individuals in history as conditioned by the interplay of societal forces, Kim was also debunking the Yi Sunsin myth Yi was helping to re-create and sustain. As Kim explained, the victories of the famed admiral were just a product of the contemporary levels of technology in Korea.Footnote ⁷⁶ All in all, Kim defined Yi Kwangsu as a provincial fascist of sorts. As seen by Kim, Yi was modelling himself on the fascistic leaders of the reactionary last-days bourgeoisie of the capitalist centres. He was dreaming of translating his literary influence into political capital, in order to serve the aims of the colonial ruling class to which he himself, as a rich bestseller writer, belonged.

It is unquestionable that after 1939 Yi Kwangsu became a propagandist for Japan's war machine. Much of the war propaganda he produced followed the stereotypes developed by propagandists of the European Axis powers. For example, his article ‘European War’ (Ōshū no dōran) published in Japanese in the Government-General's daily Keijō Nippō on 10 September 1939, proclaimed the irredentist ambitions of Italy legitimate, denounced Czechoslovakia and Poland as ‘puppet states designed by their Anglo-French masters’ and rejoiced in Germany's ‘triumphs’.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, the question of the degree to which his worldview of the early 1930s may be classified as fascist is a complicated one. Indisputably, Yi used to show an interest in European fascism. This interest became much keener once Hitler took power. As early as June 1933, the intellectual journal Tonggwang, run by Yi's close friend and fellow An Ch'angho disciple, Chu Yohan (1900–1979)—which also served as a main outlet for Yi's own writings—published, as the first in its series of popular books on current issues (Tonggwang Ch'ongsŏ), a volume on fascism. It also included a translated fragment from Hitler's Mein Kampf. The 23 page-long translation was done by Chŏn Wŏnbae (1903–1984), then a young teacher at the Protestant Yŏnhǔi College (today's Yonsei University), who then rose to become South Korea's foremost authority on classical German philosophy. In several writings, Yi Kwangsu offered praise to Mussolini and Italian fascists.Footnote ⁷⁸ In one piece, entitled ‘Return to the State of the Beast, Youth, Unite to Fight Epoch's Evil!’, he openly admonished his readers ‘to learn from the Italian fascist youth, strong and sincere’. He appealed to them ‘to unite for serving Korea and sacrificing for Korea's sake’ instead of following ‘beastly’ trends of modern days’ eroticized mass culture.Footnote ⁷⁹

However, most of Yi Kwangsu's appeals to ‘unity, sacrifice, heroism and life of service and worship’ from the first half of the 1930s used more traditionalist paradigms of references rather than the examples from Hitler's and Mussolini's practice. Yi referred to ‘Korea's old beautiful morals’, Buddhism, or even Christianity, rather than the European far right. He attempted to present Korea's age-old village order, with its supposed emphasis upon ‘respectfulness towards the seniors, filial piety, mutual help, feeling of duty and loyalty towards the community’ as an ideal prototype for a benign social order he termed ‘totalitarian’ (literally ‘whole-ism’: chǒnch'ejuǔi). All these presumed ‘virtues of old Korea’ were contrasted to the ‘Anglo-American egoism, individualism and hedonism (hyangnakchuǔi) of the modern days’. Interestingly enough, Yi praised his own employer, Tong'a Ilbo's major stakeholder Kim Sǒngsu, as a ‘paragon of old Korea's virtue’, claiming that Kim's entrepreneurial activities had ‘the service to the country’ as their main aim.Footnote ⁸⁰ In this way, the rhetoric of ‘patriotism and service’ was definitely employed for legitimizing the entrepreneurship of Korea's modernizing elite. But, instead of praising contemporaneous Italian or German fascism as examples of ‘totalitarian societies of duty and service’, Yi preferred, in many of his writing from the early 1930s, to speak either in generally moralistic or religious tones. In line with the old ‘hero-worshipping’ rhetoric loved by Korea's early modernizers of the 1900s, Yi was describing the ‘unusual people of times of crisis’ as ‘heroes’ who freed themselves from attachment to their physical lives, to their families and to material wealth.Footnote ⁸¹ He was appealing to Korean youth to understand the ephemeral nature of individual life and transcend it by rejecting all individual desires for the sake of the nation or loftier principles.Footnote ⁸² However, he was enlisting Christ, Gandhi and Tolstoy—clearly not the best loved personages among the Italian or German fascists!—as the examples of ‘selfless devotion’ and ‘life of service to the others’.Footnote ⁸³ Whilst his nativist, völkisch pitch undoubtedly paralleled that of the contemporaneous European and Japanese far right, it strikes a reader as often sounding rather more moderately moralist than politically extremist.

Until the late 1930s, Yi was more willing to elaborate on the importance of Tan'gun, the mythical progenitor of Koreans whom Yi considered ‘the founding father of the Korean statehood’,Footnote ⁸⁴ than to speak openly and in detail on his attachment to Hitler or Mussolini. What were the reasons for such a self-restrained attitude in relationship to the European far right? After all, did not Yi demonstrate a clear and unambiguous proximity with its basic values—all-encompassing ‘totality’, ‘self-sacrificial heroic’ mode of behaviour, ‘leadership’ and ‘obedience’? The reasons seem to be manifold and complicated. First, many young educated Koreans amongst Yi's readers might combine nationalist beliefs with a lingering attachment to either leftist or liberal ideals. Thus, the appeals to ‘our old values’, Tan'gun and Yi Sunsin might have been a better hegemonic strategy than outright references to the foreign extremist ideas, regardless of the personal interest Yi had in them. Second, the grand militarist designs of Hitler or Mussolini obviously did not fit with the situation of Korea's colonial bourgeoisie, alienated from political power and anxious to go along well with its Japanese masters. And third—last but not least—Yi's mentor An Ch'angho remained a democratic nationalist. Thus, Yi was in no position to deviate significantly from An's design, especially given Yi's ambition to position himself as An's best disciple. An's vision of a future Korean state—termed taegongchuǔi, or the ‘great unity-ism’—was a sort of national unity-based democracy. It required citizens to put the common good above their own private interests, but did not imply a ‘totalitarian’ way of totally sacrificing the personal, and, moreover, envisioned even a place for a workers’ movement.Footnote ⁸⁵ This vision may be termed ‘right-wing nationalist’, and An Ch'angho's ideology of ‘cultivating the national strength’ was indisputably Social Darwinist in its inspirations. Yet An—unlike Yi—never strayed significantly from more or less moderate nationalism, with its acknowledgement (partly Christian-influenced) of the importance of each individuality, and genuine totalitarian ideology. Until An's death in 1938, Yi was putting certain restraints upon his rhetoric. After 1938–1939, however, his writing became undistinguishable from Japan's mainstream war propaganda.

Yi Kwangsu's narcissist obsession with the ‘grandeur and beauty of our tradition’ was, to a degree, an expression of the pervasive zeitgeist of the mid-1930s, both in Korea and in Japan. On the one hand, strengthened police repressions against the leftists, together with internal squabbles, brought about dissolution of Korea's foremost association of the left-wing creative intelligentsia, the Korean Federation of Proletarian Artists, in May 1935. It destroyed much of the institutional underpinnings of the progressive opposition to nationalism. On the other hand, general gloom in a depression-ridden, fascism-infested Europe and the visible crisis of Western-style parliamentary politics in Japan led many intellectuals to question the basic assumptions of the (implicitly Eurocentric) modern universalism. Many turned to ethno-cultural particularity in search of new grounds for subjectivity, both personal and national. As a result, by the mid-1930s the exaggerated fascination with Korea's beautified and purified cultural self became common for many intellectuals, some of Yi Kwangsu's erstwhile critics included.Footnote ⁸⁶ Pak Yŏnghŭi, the former Korean Federation of Proletarian Artists activist once so critical of Yi Kwangsu's vision of ‘Korean-ness’, came by 1934 to talk about the turn towards ‘totality of national culture’. According to him, the ‘national perspective’ could free former leftists like him from their self-imposed ‘class isolation’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The ‘turn to the national culture’ influenced also those leftists, who, unlike Pak Yŏnghŭi, still did not wish to fully part with their original beliefs. Their views of ‘national legacy’ were still influenced by their favoured ‘scientific methods’. Kim Myǒngsik, for example, in his 1935 essay on Tan'gun understood him to be a supreme god of both Ancient Chosŏn (circa the tenth to seventh centuries BC to 108 BC) and Koguryŏ (BC 37–AD 668) kingdoms rather a historical figure.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, the focus of their attention was definitely shifting to broadly national, rather than class-related subjects. ‘National culture’ was no longer looked down upon as reactionary by definition. As a prominent left-wing fiction writer, Kim Namch’ŏn (1911–1953), insisted in 1935 that one had to distinguish between Tan'gun (as a ‘healthy’ national symbol) and ‘stories of Tan'gun magic’ (as ‘outmoded past’).Footnote ⁸⁹

All those obsessions with ‘nation, culture and tradition’ did not, however, develop further into more aggressive and assertive forms of nationalism akin to the contemporaneous German and Italian examples until the total mobilization of the intellectuals for war propaganda began in 1938–1939. One reason for this seems to be the impact of the particular combination of residual liberalism and cultural nationalist ambition typical of many influential Japanese thinkers of that period. A foremost representative of the Japanese ‘cultural particularism’ movement of the 1930s was Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960). He combined in his Rinrigaku (Ethics, 1931) and Fudō (1927–1935; English translation—Climate and Culture, Tokyo: Ministry of Education, 1961) a belief in national or cultural totality as ‘the essence of the authentic self of each individual’ with a degree of affirmation of internationalism as a mode of cooperation between the constituent ethno-political communities of the globe.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990) was a leader of the Kyoto School of philosophy, who was particularly influential in the Korean intellectual milieu of the mid and late 1930s.Footnote ⁹¹ In his 1940 Shūkyō to bunka (Religion and Culture), he did approve of what he understood as fascism's Nietzschean drive towards self-discipline. However, this was combined with a scathing criticism of Hitler's racist ravings.Footnote ⁹² It was, after all, precisely the self-centred hegemonic modernity discourse of the global West driven to absurdity in Hitler's racist excesses that both Japanese and Korean cultural particularists supposedly wanted to overcome (albeit by the all too modern method of total warfare, if necessary). Another influence upon Korean intellectuals was a maverick ‘existentialist Marxist’ and reluctant collaborator with the Japanese war-time establishment, Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945). Following Miki, a prominent Korean ex-Communist (‘ideologically converted’) theoretician,Footnote ⁹³ Sŏ Insik (?1906), viewed in the late 1930s the post-war East Asian ‘new order’ as, first and foremost, post-capitalist.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such ‘particularist’ dimensions as national traditions and culture were deemed secondary in relation to this ‘universalist’ requirement.

Miki Kiyoshi's or Sŏ Insik's universalism notwithstanding, the war-time mobilization system in Japan and its colonies, Korea included, assumed after 1938–1939 the institutional and ideological forms which may well be deemed fascist, despite all the differences between Japan's ‘fascism from above’ (Maruyama Masao) enforced in top-down fashion by the established administrative and intellectual elite, and the European (Italian and German) models.Footnote ⁹⁵ Much of the writings by the collaborative Korean intellectuals published in this ‘total mobilization period’, and particularly after the start of the war against America in 1941, would qualify as bona fide fascist literature, with the typical cult of unquestioning patriotism, battlefield bravery and ‘heroic death’ underpinned by full repudiation of any form of individuality.Footnote ⁹⁶ But such a development was as much a negation of the preceding ideological forms as their continuation. True, some right-wing intellectuals of the 1930s were developing in the direction which may be termed broadly fascistic, although their levels of bellicosity and ethno-cultural exclusionism were hardly comparable with those of their European kindred spirits. But at the same time, for many Korean intellectuals it was not easy to give up their hard-won modernist universalist ideas. And both An Ch'angho's Christian attachment to the idea of ‘individual’ and Sŏ Insik's lingering Marxist anti-capitalism prepared the ground for the eventual development of liberal and socialist trends in post-1945 Korea.

Concluding remarks: fascism—fascination and workability

Is it possible to speak on the development and popularization of the fascist ideology in early 1930s Korea? If we define fascism in a narrower way, reducing it mainly to the ideas and practices of the European far right of the 1920s–1940s, often (but not always) anti-Semitic, bent on external territorial aggrandizement and desirous for an explicitly anti-liberal state, that is something hardly applicable to the Korean intellectual history of the early 1930s. Even while deeply respecting Mussolini, such Korean intellectuals as Yun Ch'iho could despise Hitler and sympathize with the Jewish plight. Indeed, sympathy towards Jews was expressed by a major mainstream newspaper, Tong'a Ilbo. In early 1930s’ colonial Korea, liberalism remained a noble, if elusive dream for many mainstream intellectuals, including, with certain reservations, such major figures as An Ch'angho. Expansionism or anti-Semitism were simply not on the agenda in a colonized country with no Jews to speak of. However, the fascistic mood in a broader sense was already in the air. The colonial bourgeoisie, sceptical of the further usefulness of its erstwhile liberal ideas, and aspiring to legitimize its cooperation with Japanese aggression in China and curb the popularity of left-wing ideas, was turning back to its old Social Darwinism of the 1900–1910s which it had never fully discarded. Yi Kwangsu, together with other authors of the Tong'a Ilbo circle, was competing with the Left for the ideological hegemony by propagating what the Left viewed as fascistic—‘self-sacrifice’, ‘all-encompassing love of the nation’, ‘worshipping attitude’ in life, and the cult of the ‘leaders’. That largely the same people became assiduous ideological servants of the Japanese war machine after 1939 may hardly be ascribed to the Japanese state coercion only. While the presence of such coercion is undeniable, the worship of totalitarian values among the Korean nationalist intelligentsia predated the onset of the full-scale invasion of China in 1937. It may be, in its main features, traced back to the Social Darwinist values learned already in the 1900–1910s.

Cooperation with the Japanese war machine was at least partly voluntarily, although it should not be teleologically seen as an inescapable consequence of the Social Darwinist leanings of the 1900–1910s. However, the visible persistence of Social Darwinist nationalism (which became manifest in the beginning of the 1930s) throughout the seemingly liberal 1920s leads us to question the extent to which liberalism may become an ideological main staple of a peripheral (in a world-systemic sense of the word) bourgeoisie. For such a bourgeoisie, the liberal beliefs are difficult to adopt and practice, given the uncertainty of its position in general and especially the difficulties in securing a safe ideological ground in combat against the leftist forces. The Left, in a peripheral area, is always able to make an issue of the abysmal social inequalities and the tendency of the local capitalists to collaborate with the power structures seen as illegitimate (in Korea's case, the colonial state). It looks as if the Korean bourgeoisie in the 1920s, as represented by the Tong'a Ilbo circle, was approaching liberalism rather from the position of political expediency than deeper ideological loyalty. It was then gradually abandoned as its usefulness was coming to the end. Liberalism resurfaced after Korea became independent from Japan in 1945, but very soon it developed in South Korea into a typical cold war ideology, which emphasized anti-communism much stronger than individual freedom.Footnote ⁹⁷ But, as we have already seen, anti-communism was already a major part of the Korean bourgeois worldview in the 1920s and 1930s.