Social Protest in Colonial Korea

Izumi, Yutaro

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tqfh-xz63

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Social Protest in Colonial Korea

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This thesis studies social protest in colonial Korea (1910-1945). In the first two chapters, I study protest by Koreans against the Japanese colonial authority. In particular, I focus on the March First Movement in 1919, the largest anti-colonial independence movement during the colonial era, and examine its propagation (chapter 1) and political consequences (chapter 2). In the third chapter, I study tenancy disputes, protest by tenant farmers against landlords. The first chapter quantitatively studies the role of periodic markets in the March First Movement (1919). Using a daily panel data set of protests, I document that the incidence of protest is higher and protests are of a larger scale on market-opening days. Moreover, I find that the effect is stronger when coordination is likely more difficult, suggesting that the regularity of periodic markets constitutes a spatial and temporal focal point, facilitating coordination to protest. The estimation results support a historical account that periodic markets played an important role in the March First Movement. The second chapter examines the role of education in the consolidation of colonial dominance in colonial Korea under Japanese rule. First, I study the local impact of the March First Movement in 1919 on the provision of public primary education by the Japanese, using a novel county-level panel data set. Instrumenting the intensity of the protests with a plausibly exogenous variation in rainfall frequency, I document that the colonial authority increased investments in public primary education more in areas with higher intensity of the independence movement. The historical accounts and the patterns in the data suggest that the indoctrination motive of the colonial authority is a plausible explanation of the finding: it attempted to restore the regime stability by instilling Japanese ideology to Korean children through education to create obedient and loyal imperial subjects who would accept the Japanese rule. Finally, I provide suggestive evidence that the greater provision of public primary education in the 1920s is associated with higher political stability by lowering the number of anti-colonial activists from the affected cohorts. The last chapter studies the effect of agrarian tenancy contract on peasant protest under weather shock. Using a novel county-level data set from colonial Korea in the 1930s, I find that, while abnormal rainfall shocks increase disputes between tenant farmers and landlords in the following year, the effect of weather shocks is significantly weaker in places with a higher proportion of sharecropping contract as opposed to fixed rent contract. The result suggests that the risk-sharing function of the sharecropping contract works as social insurance, mitigating social unrest under economic shock.

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