The “Moment of the Boomerang” Never Came: Resistance and Collaboration in Colonial Korea, 1919–1945

The contradiction between the colonial ideology of universalism and the rule of difference may result in discontentment among the ruled, but it does not always lead to sustainable organized resistance. In many Western colonies during the interwar period, growing anti‐colonial resistance replaced collaboration; however, in Korea that was under Japanese colonial rule, resistance during the 1920s was superseded by collaboration in the 1930s. Adopting two accounts of ideology‐resource pair and structural characteristics of Japanese colonialism, this article analyzes the progression of liberal nationalism in Korea from resistance to collaboration. In colonial Korea, a separatist project led by the liberal nationalism started as a promising anti‐colonial movement, but by the end of the 1920s, it became apparent that the resources engendered by the separatism had validated both anti‐colonial nationalism as well as colonialism, thereby undermining its legitimacy. A more serious crisis occurred in the early 1930s: with the “decline of the West” and its associated intensified Japanese assimilationism, liberal nationalism not only lost its ideological ground but also came to overlap with assimilationism. The Korean elite's political conversion during the 1930s took place in a contradictory situation in which their nationalist practices ironically contributed to the empowerment of the colonial rule.