By Jun J

For 35 years, the place I inhabit today was not known as Korea — it was part of Japan. The annexation formalized in 1910 lasted until Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945. During the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), the capital was called Hanyang. From 1910 to 1945, under Japanese colonial rule, the city was officially known as Keijō in Japanese and Gyeongseong in Korean. Only after liberation did it formally adopt the earlier vernacular name of Seoul.

My father-in-law still speaks Japanese well. Not because he was associated with the Japanese empire, but because those who lived on this land went to school facing Tokyo, bowed, and assumed Japanese names and language in public — then went home, spoke Korean, and dreamed of the flag, of liberation, and of hope. The 1939 Name Order, which required Koreans to adopt Japanese-style names, is one of the best-remembered symbols of that era, alongside the school system that made Japanese the language of instruction.

Competing under another flag

In 1936, when Korean athletes competed at the Berlin Olympics — the Games made famous by Jesse Owens' defiance of Hitler's terrible ideology — they did so with a Japanese flag on their chest. The most famous was Son Kee-chung, who won the marathon and became the first Korean to win an Olympic gold medal. His fellow Korean Nam Seung-yong took bronze in the same race. Yet neither man stood on the podium as Korean. They competed as representatives of the Japanese Empire, with the Japanese flag beside their names. Son later recalled that he felt ashamed rather than proud when he saw the Japanese flag raised above him. In Korean memory, the moment has endured precisely as such a symbol: Son's record is recorded in official Olympic registers under the Japanese rendering of his name, a small fact that keeps the dispute over how that history is written alive.

Some may not realize it, but for a very long time Korea as we know it today did not exist. It could not be found on a map. Consider: when you pick up a map and look for Persia, the Ottoman Empire, or Manchuria, you do not find them. You know these names from history books, but on the modern globe they are gone — national empires that have disappeared. That should remind us that although we treat such states as permanent, eternal entities, they are far from it. They are social constructs that rise and fall, just as the deeds of men.

Colonization by the rules of the time

So yes, Korea was colonized, and yes, by the Japanese. But it was done in accordance with the rules of the time, and according to the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement, under which the United States acknowledged Japan's sphere of influence over Korea in exchange for Japan recognizing U.S. control over the Philippines. Sovereignty, in other words, was something the great powers could negotiate over the heads of the people who actually lived in the territories concerned. Japan consolidated that position step by step — a protectorate in 1905, effective administrative control through resident-generals from 1906, and full annexation in 1910 — each layer wrapped in legal formality.

But that is not the colonization I want to talk about. That colonization — the flags, the names, the treaties — was just the beginning; it was the scaffolding. The real structure was built inside. And the worst part? We built it ourselves. The crucial thing about colonialism is that it does not always end when the colonial government leaves. Institutions can disappear while habits of thought remain. A political empire can collapse while its categories survive.

I want to discuss a colonization that is more ideological, and that still has enormous effects on the country today. One of the clearest examples of colonization lies not in hairstyles or physical objects, but in the way it can make a nation rethink, rewrite, and reshape its entire history.

Judging one's own history by another's standards

At the beginning of the 20th century, when the Western powers came to the East, Korea set out to see itself as their equal and to posit that it, too, could achieve enlightenment through its own history — not necessarily through Western history. In doing so, Koreans began sifting through their own accomplishments, figures, and people of the past. But they came to value their own history only insofar as it contributed to the march of progress in global history. They judged their past by standards made in the West rather than by domestic or indigenous measures. That is how colonization can make a nation read its own history differently. The real colonizer is the ideology that makes you hate your own stories because they don't fit a spreadsheet.

The strange thing is that this is not actually done by the colonizers; it is done by the colonized. It is a self-colonization. There is a policeman in your head, and that policeman is focused above all on the scientific revolution, on empirical data, on everything that pushes us toward rationality. In doing so, it makes us forget the myth, the stories, the reach into the beyond — the things that unite people and the things that cannot be put into words. These are the things Korea has, in some way, abandoned, because it seeks to be a colonizer of itself, like those who colonized it.

Internal disorder, external chaos

During the age of empire, a whole slew of Korean groups pursued different aims. Those in Seoul and those in Pyongyang held very different opinions on all of this. And because the South is a democracy, its citizens are not unified either: they remain deeply divided about who the perpetrators were, who the belligerents were, and how and why justice should be sought for the division and colonization of Korea. That divide has an institutional history: South Korea set up a series of official bodies — notably the truth commissions and property investigations launched in the 2000s under the Framework Act on Clearing Past Incidents for Truth and Reconciliation — to examine Japanese-era collaboration, and the outcomes remain contested to this day. There is a traditional four-character expression: internal disorder, external chaos. That was the problem in Korea — or at least how it has been described. Because whether the approach was nationalist or colonialist, there was always an impulse among Koreans to appraise cultural practices, if not the whole nation and its culture on a grand scale, in terms of their compatibility with the ideals of a civilized nation and capitalist modernity.

The point is that the measuring stick by which things were gauged was completely changed. You can only find that which you are measuring for. If you use a thermometer, you will never find out how loud something is; if you use a breathalyzer, you will never find out how hot or cold something is. The instrument you use determines the results you find.

Since the turn of the 20th century, Koreans have been measuring their own present — and, more importantly, their own past — by the measuring stick of the scientific revolution, of rationality and modernity associated with the left hemisphere of the brain. Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist; they are simply different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how best to share the spoils. That is what we see in the North and the South. However different they may seem, both are a reflection of the same thing. In a way, they are both outrageously Korean — and, by the same token, products of imperialism, and not Korean at all.

Rethinking the measuring stick

The big question, then, is how Koreans measured themselves before the age of imperialism, before their minds were taken over by judgments based on growth, progress, economy, and material conditions. We know the answer; the religious, cultural, and philosophical conditions are well studied — the Confucian statecraft and cosmology of the Joseon order among them. The real question is: can we ever return to them? Do we even want to return to them?

Returning is not just about nostalgia. It means saying that GDP, literacy rates, and scientific output are not the only things that make a life meaningful. For a nation that clawed its way from poverty to prosperity using exactly those tools — rising from the wreckage of the 1950–53 Korean War to become one of the world's largest economies within two generations — that is a terrifying thought; it feels like a betrayal of everything that brought us here. The goal, therefore, is not to undo anything, but simply to rethink the measuring stick.

That is how Korea will achieve real liberation from colonization. Not by shaming a young woman celebrity because her grandfather did something — that is scapegoating, and it achieves nothing beyond virtue signaling. The real colonization is the colonization that happens in your mind, the one that tells you the only good thing is that which was decided by the Enlightenment.

Korea remains colonized because it still thinks the West is the umpire. Until Korea realizes the game doesn't need an umpire, it will always be playing someone else's sport.