The Japanese Role in Korea's Economic Development

밑에 글은  외국 학생들이 배우는 '세계사' 수업시간의 paragraph중 하나다.
관중규표(管中窺豹)라 하였다. 작은 밥그릇하나를 빼앗길까 노심초사해야했던 가난함때문에 더욱더 치가 떨리고, 화가 치밀어 감정적일 수밖에 없던 시절이 있었다. 이제 밥은 먹고 다닐만 하니 멀리 넓게 볼 필요가 있다.
올드보이의  대사처럼 '왜 가뒀을까?가 아니라 왜 풀어줬을까?'라는 고민을 해야할 때이다.
질문이 틀리면 명료한 답을 얻을 수 없다.

외국인들은 일본이 한국에 많은 도움을 줬다고 배우고, 대부분 그렇게 생각한다.
만약 그런 외국인을 만난다면 뭐라고 항변할 것인가?

아이러니하게도 어제 기사를 보니 해외시장에서 고객들이 삼성과 LG 등 한국의 유수기업을 일본이나 미국회사계 회사로 착각했기때문에 미국,일본,독일 기업과의 경쟁에서 순수 기술경쟁만을 할 수 있었다고 한다.

"Image -> illusion -> Imagoly"
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The Japanese, who dominated Korea from the late 1890s to 1945 and who governed Korea as a colony from 19l0 to 1945, were responsible for the initial economic modernization of Korea. Before 1900 Korea had a relatively backward agricultural economy. According to scholar Donald S. Macdonald, for centuries most Koreans lived as subsistence farmers of rice and other grains and satisfied most of their basic needs through their own labor or through barter. The manufactures of traditional Korea-- principally cloth, cooking and eating utensils, furniture, jewelry, and paper--were produced by artisans in a few population centers.

Following the annexation of Korea in 19l0, Japan thrust a modern blend of industrial capitalism onto a feudal agrarian society. By the end of the colonial period, Japan had built an extensive infrastructure of roads, railroads, ports, electrical power, and government buildings that facilitated both the modernization of Korea's economy and Japan's control over the modernization process. The Japanese located various heavy industries--steel, chemicals, and hydroelectric power--across Korea, but mainly in the north.

The Japanese government played an even more active role in developing Korea than it had played in developing the Japanese economy in the late nineteenth century. Many programs drafted in Korea in the 1920s and 1930s originated in policies drafted in Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1912). The Japanese government helped to mobilize resources for development and provided entrepreneurial leadership for these new enterprises. Colonial economic growth was initiated through powerful government efforts to expand the economic infrastructure, to increase investment in human capital through health and education, and to raise productivity.

In some respects, South Korean patterns of development after the early 1960s closely followed the methodology introduced by the Japanese fifty years earlier--industrialization from above using a strong bureaucracy that formulated and implemented economic policies. Many of the developments that took place in Chosen, the Japanese name for Korea during the period of colonization, had also occurred in pre-World War II Japan; they were implementation of a strong education system and the spread of literacy; the rise of a strong, authoritarian government that combined civilian and military administration to govern the state with strict discipline; the fostering and implementation of comprehensive economic programs by the state through its control of the huge national bureaucracy; the close collaboration between government and business leaders; and the development of industries by the major Japanese zaibatsu (commercial conglomerates).

Some political analysts, for example, Bruce Cumings and Gavan McCormick, have been impressed with the common elements in prewar and postwar economic growth in South Korea and especially with top-down government management of the economy. Economists, such as Paul W. Kuznets, however, also draw attention to the dysfunctional aspects of the colonial legacy and find some of the discontinuities important.

It is also important to note that between the end of World War II and Park Chung Hee's ascension to power in 1961, there was a major rupture, both politically and economically, from the Japanese colonial period. There was considerable disruption after 1945 because of plant exhaustion; the loss of linkages with Japanese capital and with upstream and downstream industrial facilities; the loss of technical expertise, distribution systems, and markets; and the subsequent obliteration of the industrial plant during the Korean War (1950-53).