Indigenous Collaboration under Foreign Occupation: A Case Study of Japanese-Occupied Koreans from 1910 to 1945

Based on their service to foreign authorities, indigenous collaborators often face the overwhelming influence of the occupying force as well as threats from fellow nationals. Thus, the key question is how collaborators secure their precarious middle ground among such tense relationships. To answer the question, my dissertation explores the case of Koreans living under Japanese occupation during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945, using archival data recently made available by the South Korean government. I find that Korean collaborators constantly produce the ideas of the nation in order to navigate through their difficult situations, thus broadening their spheres of action between the occupying power and their fellow nationals. Faced with immense communal pressure in the early period of occupation, Korean elites who collaborated protected their middle ground by 1) highlighting Korea's incompetency compared to Japan. As they were located in a relatively autonomous situation, the elites negotiated with Japanese authorities by 2) enhancing the status of their fellow Koreans. However, under the stringency of Japan's control after the mid-1930s, they reconfigured the situation by 3) defining Koreans as having the same collective identity as the Japanese. My doctoral research makes three substantive contributions to sociology and social sciences more broadly. Above all, in the burgeoning body of literature on colonialism and imperialism, this project examines the process of foreign domination from the unique perspective of collaborators—rather than of colonizers or indigenous resisters—and further, illuminates the power and effectiveness of political claims and cultural meanings that collaborators invigorate in an occupied world. Next, my research moves beyond the existing sociological understanding of agency as a random, volatile dimension of social action by clearly showing three interwoven mechanisms of agentic processes in which social actors broaden their legitimate space of action within the distinctive arrangement of a relational structure. Lastly, the findings on collaborators' different conceptualizations of the nation demonstrate the theoretical applicability of my research to the dynamic mechanisms of identity politics, particularly concerning the practices of intermediary actors located between opposing expectations, conflicting cultural values and norms, and disparate political opinions and policies.