ISSUES

THE OSTENSIBLE CALM of the 1920s suddenly disappeared, and the stability that seemed to have been achieved in East Asia was lost with the onset of the new decade. In the 1930s, the international system and its supporting ideology, utopianism, entirely collapsed with the rise of the three “revisionist powers,” namely Nazi Germany and Italy in Europe, and Japan in East Asia. These powers’ policies were now more disposed to confrontation than to compromise with the “status quo powers” of Great Britain, France and the United States. Japan became deeply involved in this process, and, as a result, the East Asian international system rapidly merged into a revised global framework.

The 1930s were crucial in terms of the great powers’ changing perceptions of Korea. These Western perceptions went relatively unnoticed when the relationships between Japan and the Western powers were friendly and cooperative, or when Japan's foreign policy at least remained “limitedly expansionist” in a milieu of cooperation with the West, or when Japan's relations with the powers were overwhelmingly important compared with their interests in the peninsula. In the 1930s, East Asian politics took a sudden and complete turn as Japan's foreign policy became more openly expansionist, seeking to modify the existing regional system. It was in the light of such changes that the powers came to a new understanding of the importance of the Korean peninsula in Japan's empire and foreign policy. The powers’ guarantee of Korean independence after World War II was founded upon this awakening.

This chapter will briefly cover the shifts in East Asia caused by Japan's initiatives. It will review the era's significant pivots, focusing on the Western powers’ assessment of the political, strategic and economic value of the peninsula in relation to Japan's continental policy, followed by problems of Japan's governance in Korea, and the reactions of the Korean people. Lastly, the altered attitudes of the powers toward the people and society of Korea will form a starting point for studying the Korean question in the 1940s.