Introduction: Not Postcolonial Enough?

Korea rarely figures in postcolonial studies. Scholars generally agree that the Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910–1945) was one of the most intense: to govern over 22 million Koreans, the empire installed on the Korean Peninsula a mammoth apparatus of 52,000 Japanese bureaucrats,Footnote ¹ and its police achieved a ubiquitous presence even to the smallest village; millions of Koreans were uprooted to swiftly industrialise the territory with the goal of turning it into a springboard for expansion into Manchuria; and, during the Pacific War effort, the Japanese mobilised Koreans into labour and the military, coerced them into practicing Shinto rituals, and forced the Korean elites to adopt Japanese names. In assessing the impact of colonial rule on Korea, much of the English-language scholarship focuses on the economic and political reverberations. There are also several recent studies in English and a large number of studies in Korean on the transformations of Korean society, culture, literature, and language during the colonial period, mostly from the perspective of advent of modernity.Footnote ² Yet, while to Korean scholars it goes without question that Korea after liberation was, and in many aspects remains, a postcolonial society mired in issues stemming from its colonial experience, the topics of Korean postcolonialism and decoloniality in knowledge production rarely draw the attention of researchers outside the country.Footnote ³

Post- and de-colonial studies—shaped by thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Walter Mignolo—have often centred on the legacies of subalternity and epistemic violence in regions where colonial rule tore down precolonial structures, marginalised indigenous languages, and drew arbitrary new borders. In contrast, Korea’s experience of Japanese colonial rule demonstrates more continuity in certain aspects: prior to colonisation, Korea had long existed as a single, centralised state (some would say a nationFootnote ⁴) occupying the same territory; neither its annexation nor the liberation redrew its borders; the language, although transformed during the colonial period, was reclaimed as soon as the Japanese left; and the period under Japanese rule was relatively brief.Footnote ⁵ In terms of the production of historical knowledge—the main subject of this research—the well-established historiographical tradition prior to colonisation also sets the Korean case apart. All of these factors should have made it easier for Korea to decolonise when it gained independence, but did they? Was the process swift, simple, and complete to the extent that Korea can be safely put close to the “minimum” pole on the spectrum of postcolonial ordeal?

The distinction between postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, as outlined in the opening article of this special issue, offers an important lens through which to understand Korea’s experience after the formal end of colonial rule. While postcolonial refers to the continued entanglement with colonial structures of knowledge and authority, decolonial approaches call for a more radical rupture: breaking away from the epistemic and institutional legacies of colonial domination. As Walter Mignolo has argued, decoloniality entails a transformation of the terms and loci of knowledge, not merely its content; i.e., it seeks to “undo” the underlying structures of knowledge that continue to privilege Eurocentric worldviews and colonial logics even in the absence of formal empire.Footnote ⁶ He posits that decolonial shift involves a two-step process: first a “delinking from the coloniality of knowing,” and second, an “epistemic reconstitution.”Footnote ⁷

This study in some respects is closer in focus to the decolonial emphasis on rupture rather than the postcolonial attention to entanglement. However, the case of Korea complicates the more typical colonial/postcolonial binary. Although it shares with other postcolonial societies the goal of undoing imperial legacies, Korea was not colonised by a Western empire but by Japan, itself a latecomer to imperial modernity. As a result, the coloniality of knowledge in Korea includes both direct Japanese epistemic impositions and Japan-mediated transmissions of Western categories, values, and historiographical norms. Decolonial transformation in this context would therefore require peeling away multiple overlapping layers: Japanese structures of knowledge and power, Eurocentric frames that entered through Japan, and their hybridised forms that shaped colonial Korean thought. Moreover, the end of Japanese rule did not mean full epistemic or political independence. The decades following liberation were marked by a new form of domination, this time under the aegis of the United States. US rule through USAMGIK (United States Army Military Government in Korea), its shaping of South Korean institutions, and the bilateral alliance solidified by the Korean War exerted profound influence on South Korea’s political structures, economic policies, and modes of knowledge production. In this sense, Korea’s efforts to decolonise knowledge after liberation unfolded not in a vacuum, but under conditions that, given the overwhelming epistemic dominance of the US, can be described as neocolonial.Footnote ⁸

This study explores how South Korean intellectuals began to recognise and confront colonial and neocolonial influences in historical thought and writing during the first two decades after liberation and the founding of the Republic. Under scrutiny here is Sasanggye 思想界 (World of Thought; published 1953–1970), the most widely circulated and discussed intellectual magazine in Korea at the time. With contributors and readers spanning academics, journalists, politicians, students, and artists, Sasanggye played a formative role in Korea’s intellectual landscape and public debate throughout the 1950s and 60s. Its charter stated that the periodical’s number one goal was to overcome the “history of obliteration, self-denigration, and servitude” of Korea under colonial rule.Footnote ⁹ Yet, as we will see, an active discussion of Korean history—let alone the critique of colonial historiography—in the magazine did not start until a decade later, which accounts for the lack of research into Sasanggye’s perspectives on Korean history. Existing studies on the decolonisation of Korean history in the early years of the South Korean state primarily examine the efforts of educators to construct a nationalist narrative for the classroom and the reorganization of academic institutions to reflect the new realities of the Republic of Korea as an independent and anti-communist state.Footnote ¹⁰ Scholars have also analysed post-liberation writings—novels and autobiographies—by intellectuals expressing a sense of guilt for their collaboration with the Japanese.Footnote ¹¹ The majority of studies on attempts to decolonise historical scholarship, however, focus on the emergence of internal development theories in the 1960s,Footnote ¹² most often using the literary magazine Changjak-gwa bipyeong (Creation and Criticism, established in 1966) as an example,Footnote ¹³ which leaves out the preceding period. The scholarly inquiry into Sasanggye, on the other hand, has primarily explored its contributors’ understanding of modernisation, liberal democracy, and other related concepts.Footnote ¹⁴ One notable exception is Yi Gyeongran’s studyFootnote ¹⁵ which investigated publications by historians in both Sasanggye and Changjak-gwa bipyeong, analysing the discourses the authors sought to convey to readers. Building on this research, the present study is the first to evaluate Sasanggye from the perspective of the decolonisation of history.

In examining the changes in historical knowledge and its production system in post-liberation Korea over the nearly two decades of the magazine’s publication, we do not trace each contributor’s writings individually. Instead, we delineate the major currents of discourse, identifying their characteristic features and underlying epistemes, and evaluate their connections to, and proximity with, ideas from the colonial period. The analysis demonstrates that despite the rapid replacement of the Japanese system of knowledge in Sasanggye with a US-based one, many basic ideas and values of the colonial era persisted even as the writers’ awareness of the colonial influence grew along with their determination to regain epistemological sovereignty by writing a “subjective history” of Korea from their own perspective. Consequently, the alternative histories the magazine put forth by the end of its publication retained the West-centric, colonial-in-origin, bias and were rooted in anti-colonial resistance.

In terms of the representation of Korean history under the influence of the Japanese empire, most relevant to this analysis is Japan’s concerted effort, since the late nineteenth century, to portray itself as the most advanced nation in Asia on a civilizing mission to modernise—i.e., educate, reform, and industrialize—its fellow Asians. Korea, in this vision, was presented as historically backward and dependent on others.Footnote ¹⁶ The conviction that Korea’s inability to modernise by itself posed a threat to the Japanese empire served as rationalisation for Japan’s early twentieth-century drive to colonise it. During the same time, Korean intellectuals developed a resistance discourse that accepted the notions of the deficiency and reforming inertia of the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), but it dealt with them by separating the people from the rulers and thereby redefining the history of Korea as that of the Korean people rather than of royal dynasties. This allowed Korean scholars under Japanese rule to imagine the rebuilding of the Korean nation based on its splendid traditions of non-Confucian, pre-Joseon origin (although they were unable to specify what those traditions were) and by reforming popular consciousness.Footnote ¹⁷

In what follows we first discuss Sasanggye as a site reflecting the trajectory of knowledge production in post-liberation Korea; and then examine the characteristics of history-related discourses in Sasanggye essays by period, identifying the new and colonial epistemes in the magazine contributors’ writing of history. The conclusion summarises the chronological development and assesses the overall progress made by Sasanggye in decolonising Korean historiography.

Sasanggye as Epistemic Crucible

Simultaneously with liberation in 1945, the Korean Peninsula was divided into two halves, with the USSR administering the North and the US the South. The acceleration of Cold War rivalries prompted the Soviet and American representatives to move quickly in establishing friendly regimes in their respective zones. Americans established military and civil institutions and actively guided the introduction of new systems and reforms in all spheres of Korean society, from education and film to law and medicine, at the very time when Koreans received freedoms and access to education they had been deprived of during colonial rule. Through mushrooming schools and press and an exponentially growing public sphere, Koreans in the South adopted US values, perspectives, and ideologies at an unprecedented speed and with little mediation.

Like other newly founded post-liberation media in the South—and the press in most countries of the Free World after World War II—Sasanggye had very close connections to the US in its early years. The publication of its direct predecessor, Sasang (Thought), began in September 1952, during the Korean War (1950–1953), as an initiative of the National Thought Research Institute, affiliated with the Education Ministry. The Korean post of the United States Information Service (USIS), which promoted US interests globally through informational activities, especially in the ideological dimension, supplied Sasang with paper, just as it did for many other Korean magazines, while the Readers Digest handled the distribution. When the Rhee Syngman regime (1948–1960) cut funding for the magazine due to political disagreements with the Minister of Education, leaving Sasang on the brink of bankruptcy after just four issues, its chief editor Jang Junha—who had briefly worked with the Office of Strategic Services (the US intelligence agency) during World War II—again sought and received assistance from the USIS. Armed with six months’ worth of paper and the encouragement of USIS Korea, Jang relaunched the magazine in April 1953 under the title Sasanggye.Footnote ¹⁸

Gradually growing in popularity and volume, by the late 1950s the periodical was printing 70,000 monthly copies, each running to some 500 pages and featuring contributions from leading figures in academic and public domains. Its articles routinely sparked spirited discussions across Korean society, and it came to be seen as an essential reading for anyone engaged in intellectual life. The saying “you had to carry Sasanggye to pass as a university student”Footnote ¹⁹ reflected the magazine’s cultural cachet at the time. In this way, the periodical established itself as a central medium for the production and circulation of knowledge, shaping public discourses and opinion during the pivotal years of nation-building and construction of Korean national identity after liberation and the Korean War.

In its early years the magazine devoted significant space—over half of each issue during the 1950s—to translations and related commentary. Although the periodical soon became independent financially, US influence persisted indirectly through the choice of topics. USIS provided honorariums for translating works from its curated list and sponsored their publication as books; many economists and philosophers would then contribute essays to Sasanggye, offering summaries and commentary on the books they had translated.Footnote ²⁰

Nevertheless, Sasanggye writers were likely enthusiastic about translating works by American scholars, as well as those by European thinkers published by American presses, regardless of USIS incentives. They viewed US intervention in the Korean War to save South Korea as an embodiment of American values in action and were captivated by any information they could obtain about and from the US.Footnote ²¹ Series of articles on particular concepts and theories circulating in the US—such as existentialism or political liberty—were often compiled into special issues. They reflect the perception of the US as the provider of universal values, the model of liberal democracy and capitalist modernisation, and the shepherd leading South Korea in its nation-building; almost none of them questioned the validity, applicability, or desirability of those values. Even as the number of original contributions—some of which were critical of US policies—increased in the 1960s, Sasanggye continued propagating US ideals. By then, the US had become the standard for the magazine, and the same was true for the entire system of knowledge production in South Korea. In other words, the discussions among Korean intellectuals were shaped by an overwhelming influx of information from the US. From the perspective of knowledge origins, then, the Korean case exemplifies the replacement of a former coloniser with a new, overreaching American hegemony in the context of the Cold War.

The transition from colonial rule in terms of human resources, however, was more complex. Many opinion leaders—politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars—of the time were tainted by collaboration with the Japanese colonial authorities and struggled to distance themselves from that past. The Sasanggye writers differed in this respect: Jang Junha (b. 1918) and his colleagues of similar age were among the former independence fighters, while many other contributors were too young (born in the late 1920s and 1930s) to play active roles during the colonial period.Footnote ²² Another characteristic feature of this group was their strong anti-communist stance, shaped in part by their experiences of crossing south from North Korea and experiencing the Korean War in their formative years. This dovetailed with the anti-communist doctrine of the Rhee Syngman regime, in which some Sasanggye writers even held official positions.

From the perspective of epistemic reconstitution, the magazine’s anti-communism produced an intractable entanglement: its contributors sought intellectual alternatives to North Korean Marxism without fully reckoning with the extent to which their own thinking was inflected by Marxist thought. They had been introduced to Marxist categories—such as class struggle, modes of production, and historical materialism—during or shortly after the colonial period, and these ideas continued to inform their worldviews, even in opposition.Footnote ²³ Here, too, then, the neocolonial structures imposed by the Cold War constrained the horizons of decolonial transformation.

Growing critical of the corruption and authoritarianism of the Rhee administration, the magazine began to diverge from association with the government in the late 1950s and turned into the main oppositional forum for intellectuals during the succeeding Park Chung Hee regime (1961–1979). Park pushed for normalisation of relations with Japan and economic development at the expense of liberties, while to the magazine’s contributors, sovereignty and liberal democracy remained the top priorities. The regime finally shut down Sasanggye in 1970.

Thus, in terms of its character and the life stories of its contributors, the periodical represents a clear rupture from the colonial period: it did not have connections to the colonial power structures, it conveyed views originating from the US, not Japan, and professed very different values. Yet, we cannot ignore the fact that Sasanggye writers received their first schooling when Korea was part of the Japanese empire, and many continued their studies under the guidance of faculty educated in the imperial metropole. Further, although the magazine produced knowledge through free, uncoerced discussion, it came from and was deeply influenced by another single source (the US), which the writers idealised just as colonial intellectuals did Japan. How different that knowledge in reality was from that formed under the dominance of imperial Japan is the subject of the next two sections of this article.

Belated Interest in Historical Research

Looking at the topics that Sasanggye covered in the 1950s, one cannot help but notice the lack of interest among its contributors in historical research, even less interest in the history of Asia, and close to no interest in the history of their own country. Among hundreds of essays published in the seven years before 1960, only about twenty deal with Korea’s past.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, the meaning of the word “world” in Sasanggye publications on world history—many of which comprised abridged translations of famous foreign works—was constrained to the US, France, Germany, and Britain.Footnote ²⁵ A hint to the reason for this paucity of interest in Korean history can be found in Jang Junha’s appeal to readers not to take the word “restoration” in gwangbok (lit. restoration of light; the Korean term for the 1945 liberation from the colonial rule) literally since whatever historical legacies Korea had preserved, they were outdated, “feudal … useless … fossils at the current stage of world history.”Footnote ²⁶ In reference to historiography, Jang’s colleague, economist Bae Seongryong explained that the Eastern view of history, which “sets its goal at restoring the past” was “not productive at all.”Footnote ²⁷ In the minds of Sasanggye contributors, there was nothing to learn from Korea’s history or its traditional historiography because its gaze was backward, in contrast to forward-looking Western historiography. Coupled with such statements then, the distribution of the magazine’s history-related articles reveals the hierarchy formed by colonial historiography where the West, empire, core, modernisation, and civilisation were positioned as superior to the East (with the exception of the only modern Eastern empire, Japan), colonies, periphery, pre-modern, and undeveloped.

When Korean history did come into focus, it was never about the time under Japanese rule, which may be surprising for intellectuals whose country had gained independence only a decade earlier and who had not been tainted by collaboration. It is less of a puzzle if one considers the association of anti-imperialist views with communism, the official ideology of the rival northern half of the peninsula. The fact that in its first decade South Korea experienced severe social upheavals and went through a devastating civil war, along with the unresolved colonial trauma (examined in more detail in the next section), must also have contributed to Sasanggye’s postponement of any examination of colonial history.

On the other hand, the events and character of pre-colonial Korea were frequently referenced in articles on politics and economy where Joseon appeared as stagnant, just as it was construed by Japanese historiography and accepted by Korean intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century. According to this perspective, due to Joseon scholars’ poor understanding of and blind adherence to the Neo-Confucian emphasis on morals, the country did not develop natural sciences, remaining a feudal agrarian society marked by ritualism and restricted social mobility. This culture obstructed Korea’s development. Although there were opportunities for reform with the emergence of a movement for practical learning in the nineteenth century, these did not come to fruition because of factionalism.Footnote ²⁸

It is easy to spot the central tenets of this view—adversity to pragmatism, poor productivity, inertia, complacency, and factionalism—in Sasanggye essays of the 1950s. Bae Seongryong, for example, criticised the Confucian “contempt toward physical labour.”Footnote ²⁹ Literary scholar Han Gyoseok wrote about the crowd mentality of indiscriminately following the Confucian morals that had “made our ancestors feeble and apathetic” and brought the country “to the brink of death”Footnote ³⁰; similarly, political scientist Woo Byeonggyu contended that behind the “traditional political indifference” of Koreans was the ethics of Confucianism with its emphasis on patriarchy, obedience, and overreliance on others.Footnote ³¹

In the works of Sasanggye contributors, the vision of Confucianism as historically detrimental to economic development was not limited to Korea but applied to all of Asia. Bae Seongryong argued that the tendency to prioritize agriculture over commerce originated with the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE), and since then, whenever the commercial capital grew enough to challenge the established feudal system, the ruling classes suppressed it, “arresting the natural development of economic institutions into a capitalist society” and thereby “depriving their country of the opportunity to achieve capitalist development on its own.”Footnote ³² Historian Kim Yongdeok referred to this recurring pattern as the “Asian vicious circle.”Footnote ³³ A related perspective, but in the context of democratic development, was offered by Jo Gijun who wrote that the conservative forces dominating the region during the Middle Ages stifled the formation of a civil society, and their remnants “have kept in check the democratic forces” to the present.Footnote ³⁴

Such views shared many similarities with those propagated by the Japanese empire in the first half of the twentieth century. In the same manner Japanese intellectuals had done, the Sasanggye writers made no distinction between the geographic concept of Asia and the cultural concept of the East; and both “the East” and “Asia” were understood as synonymous with backward, immature, abnormal, and the opposite of advanced.Footnote ³⁵

Ironically, the US made a significant contribution to the preservation of this colonial outlook. Sasanggye writers were interested in Asia discourses in the US and translated related works, which, in turn, projected Orientalist, Western-imperialist views of preceding epochs, reinforcing the notion of Asia’s inferiority compared to America and Western Europe. Some typical Sasanggye publications of this type included the translation of a work by William L. Holland that explained the advances made by the Chinese Communist Party with the stagnation experienced by China for centuries,Footnote ³⁶ and the article by the scholar of Buddhism Jeong Jaegak in which the author, referencing Henry Maine’s writings on village communities, located the root causes of underdevelopment and agrarian orientation of contemporary East Asian societies in the region’s history of despotism.Footnote ³⁷ One recent study argued that depicting Sasanggye’s frequent references to Asian stagnation as a revival of a colonial discourse or internalisation of Orientalism, is itself one-sided. The author posited that South Korean intellectuals needed the image of stagnation to stress the necessity of social reforms.Footnote ³⁸ However, there is little doubt that the related Sasanggye discourse was West-centric and had the same logic and direction as colonial discourse.

There were, of course, important differences as well. Colonial historiography proposed modernisation in general and enlightenment under the leadership of Japan, whereas the 1950s Sasanggye essays emphasised specifically the importance of building capitalism and democracy on the American model. Also, post-liberation Korean intellectuals discussed the sluggish performance of their own country and the rest of Asia within the framework of developmental stages that gained wide currency during the 1950s. The framework was largely rooted in the intellectual tradition of modernisation theory and more aligned with the perspectives of Western Europe, which saw development as a linear progression towards modernity. In contrast, other countries that decolonised around the same time as Korea—mostly in East and South Asia—tended to be more profoundly influenced by the Marxist tradition,Footnote ³⁹ which emphasised class struggle and the transformation of social relations.Footnote ⁴⁰ An illustrative case of how modernisation theory shaped historical thinking in Sasanggye is found in an article by political scientist Sin Sangcho, which assessed Korea’s position within the stages of growth. The author observed that in terms of economic history, Korea had “just broken the constraints of feudalism and [was] moving toward capitalism,” whereas from the angle of political history, it remained premodern and had “not reached the bourgeois democracy, the first stage of modern state.”Footnote ⁴¹

The periodical’s contributors feared that the inherent disposition of the East toward tyranny and corruption, coupled with the lack of factors advantageous to the development of a democracy, such as Weberian Protestant ethics and the presence of a bourgeois class, would prevent Korea from reaching that stage.Footnote ⁴² To overcome this deficiency, Sasanggye in the 1950s advocated the thorough adoption of the Western model. “Rather than inventing traditions we do not possess, it is better to import and introduce Western culture without mistakes, and appreciate and take it in,” wrote philosopher Yi Jongu.Footnote ⁴³ And this is one reason the magazine’s writers rejoiced when a student uprising toppled the Rhee Syngman regime in April 1960: the event helped Sasanggye contributors overcome the complex they felt about the absence of a popular revolution in Korea. “Thanks to this revolution, we are now on par with the Westerners,” wrote Yu Jino, a scholar of law and literature, with excitement.Footnote ⁴⁴ “We have now finally obtained the qualifications to talk about freedom before the world,” echoed the writer and philosopher Ahn Byeonguk, noting that with this revolution, Koreans had just undergone what modern Western societies had experienced two centuries earlier.Footnote ⁴⁵

Sasanggye contributors’ discontent with the reverse orientation of premodern Korean historiography and their apprehension about the difficulty moving to the next developmental stage underline their futurism and instrumentalism. Across disciplines, these intellectuals sought the knowledge that could be put into practice for the sake of building a better future of Korea. Finally, in 1959, the magazine editors set their eyes on historical science: they planned a special issue with the task of finding a historical perspective that might provide a new historical consciousness for the independent country.

Titled “A View of History,” the October 1959 issue of Sasanggye included such articles as “Historical Perspective as a Practical Idea” by Kim Giseok, “Spengler and Toynbee” by Min Seokhong, “The Understanding of History in Christianity” by Kim Jaejun, “The View of History in Existential Philosophy” by Jo Gagyeon, and “Climate and History” by Yi Hangnyeong. Bringing together scholars of history, literature, religion, and philosophy, the issue introduced the ways different schools of thought interpreted history. With the influence of the developmental stages theory clearly palpable, the authors contemplated the historical outlook Korean society required after the Korean War—in other words, how history might be applied to the service of nation-building.

Rather than this history-directed instrumentalism, however, truly novel in the project was the recognition of the importance of establishing a historical perspective in its own right, and the understanding that such a perspective is always subjective. The opening article, for example, argued that history cannot be viewed from a detached perspective “as if it were the moon or a cloud.” Instead, it emphasised that the understanding of history is shaped by concrete historical currents and can only be reckoned through one’s own experience within specific historical circumstances.Footnote ⁴⁶

This attention to historical subjectivity grew hand in hand with the awareness of the downsides in the history of Western modernisation as well as the realisation that it was neither possible nor desirable to perfectly replicate another nation’s path. Kim Giseok pointed out that the West had been operating under the principle of survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle, which led to economic crises, wealth concentration and poverty, imperialism and colonialism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Philosopher of law Hwang Sandeok observed that Korea could not perfectly repeat the Anglo-Saxons’ path, just as the Germans had been unable to fully imitate the British. He argued that Korea’s “unique spiritual tradition continuing for thousands of years” required adaptations rather than an immediate embrace of Protestant life consciousness. Instead, he called for rediscovering “the true values” possessed by Korea and the East to adopt in the modernization process.Footnote ⁴⁸

Hwang’s opinion can be juxtaposed with the earlier cited pleas of Sasanggye writers to get rid of the legacies of Korean history and strive to emulate the history of the West. He considered the latter approach unrealistic and believed that certain Korean traditions could and should be made use of. His colleague Yi Hangnyeong made a more concrete suggestion: to learn from both the seasonal customs-based agriculture of the East and maritime climate-based history of commerce in the West.Footnote ⁴⁹ Both Yi and Hwang thus envisioned a combination of the best from the two worlds, the West and the East.

Sasanggye’s 1959 turn toward interest in premodern Korea and the synthesis of Western and Korean or Eastern elements constituted a notable step in the direction of independent historical thinking. Ironically, however, in their uneasy, love-and-hate relationship with the West and East, the magazine contributors of the 1950s reproduced the intellectual work performed by their forefathers in the early colonial period. The Sasanggye writers retraced the intellectual tensions of the 1910s colonial thinkers in their concomitant fascination with the US and doubts regarding the merits of the Western model, as well as suggestions to consider what Korea (the East) could offer, coming on the heels of negativism toward their homeland’s past. Colonial-era intellectuals, having lambasted the Neo-Confucianism of Joseon, discussed the potential contribution Korea and its values (i.e., the East) might make to global reconstruction following World War I—the war that, in their view, had been triggered by the cutthroat competition inherent in Western modernisation. Sasanggye contributors did the same as the Cold War rivalry in the region escalated.

From the Awakening of Korean Subjectivity to the Writing of Decolonised History

Only one word sets apart the titles of Sasanggye’s 1963 and 1959 special issues: “Korean.” Yet that addition—“A View of Korean History” in 1963 versus “A View of History” in 1959—signals the key difference between the two. If the earlier publication offered an overview of the diversity of existing historical perspectives, the 1963 issue dealt specifically with historical perspectives on Korea. An outcome of a symposium held in 1962, it consisted of three articles—“Issues in National History” by Cheon Gwanu, “The Problems I See in Korean Historiography: Perspective, Evidence, and Periodisation” by Yi Gibaek, and “Korean History Perspectives of Japanese Scholars during the Imperial Period” by Kim Yongseop—and a transcript of a debate among six historians, all of which emphasised the need “to research based on our own vision of the problem”Footnote ⁵⁰ and “highlight the peculiar features of Korean history against the universal flow of world development … so that the general public does not have a disparaging opinion of Korean history.”Footnote ⁵¹

Similar ideas had been expressed before. In 1959, for example, historian Goh Byeongik had argued the need to “re-form, reinterpret, and reevaluate facts from our own standpoint”Footnote ⁵² and economist Yi Hongjik had cited the importance of forming the national historical consciousness “with our own hands, on our national sentiment” as early as in 1955.Footnote ⁵³ However, the 1963 issue marked the first time in Sasanggye these separate voices combined into a singular message projected through a special edition, as well as the first adoption of the term “subjectivity,” as in “subjectivity of national history.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The word “subjective” (juchejeok) in Korean encompasses connotations of autonomous, having agency, and proactive—all of which can be observed in the following quote:

The above excerpt is also one of multiple examples pointing to a major reason a subjective perspective of history was needed: to overcome the legacies of colonial rule. Kim Yongseop expressed his particular concern about the unabated influence of colonial historiography when he stated that the underappreciating view on Korean history, stemming from Japanese colonial education which had presented Korean history as inferior, was more disturbing than the tendency to exaggerate the superiority of Korea’s past achievements, common among youth raised in the anti-Japanese spirit that followed liberation. He urged his fellow scholars to reflect upon and confront their continued reliance on the findings of Japanese historians.Footnote ⁵⁶

Two trends were likely behind this early 1960s’ interest in decolonising the historical perspective on Korea. The more familiar intellectuals became with various theories, the stronger they felt the deficiency of efforts to perfectly imitate a foreign model. This is evident, for example, in theologian Kang Wonryong’s call to explore the roots of the Korean mentality, prompted by his discontent that “many blueprints being imported,” yet “none can cure our illnesses.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The second trend was the Park Chung Hee government’s push for the normalisation of relations with the former coloniser, Japan. Sasanggye contributors were especially upset about the state-level negotiations proceeding without any Japanese repentance or formal apology to Korea.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the words of the magazine’s editor Bu Wanhyeok, proceeding with the normalisation treaty without first “settling past wrongs” and ensuring the principles of equality and mutual respect would damage Korea’s sovereignty.Footnote ⁵⁹ Many intellectuals also feared that the inflow of Japanese capital would lead to the formation of comprador capital, thereby causing Korea’s economic subordination.Footnote ⁶⁰ Historian Ham Seokheon asked readers to consider whether Japan had truly abandoned its imperialism; “no,” he answered, “the only difference is that in the past [the Japanese colonised others] with weapons, but now they do it with money.”Footnote ⁶¹ In the eyes of Sasanggye writers, Japan remained a remorseless, defiant former colonial overlord. They hoped the normalisation talks would become the first, much delayed step toward the decolonisation of Korea-Japan relations and were profoundly frustrated that not only did that not happen, but there was a potential for the return of a dependent economic structure, akin to colonialism. Had not the counterpart been Japan, they would not have been as sensitive on the matter of diplomatic ties; their outburst and linkage of the question to national pride testified to the unresolved colonial trauma.

Despite the ostensible decolonisation drive, however, one can notice in Sasanggye publications of the time the unrelenting attention to Korea’s standing relative to the West. In an essay cited earlier, Kang suggested that to help the Korean nation attain independence it was important to seek out the roots of the Korean mentality, using as an example his investigation into the history of spiritual development in “Western society.”Footnote ⁶² In his appeal to “organise and systemise Korean history by ourselves, while sublating the historical perspective implanted by the Japanese,” Kim Yongseop urged his colleagues to emulate the French academia, which had “retained its originality” even in the face of the Nazi invasion.Footnote ⁶³

This analytical approach setting the West as the standard is in many ways a product of future-oriented instrumentalism—Sasanggye writers consistently believed that understanding how Korea compared to phases in Western history would offer insights into what was currently wrong with their own country and help them to build a better tomorrow.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, it also reveals the persistent thinking in terms of the binaries of modernisation/ development versus backwardness and civilisation versus barbarity, characteristic of the logic of Western colonial imperialism, which was familiar to Koreans from its rendition in imperial Japan. Furthermore, the Sasanggye discussions featured unambiguous commonalities with ideas of Korean colonial intellectuals: they set the objective to modernising their homeland, selected education and enlightenment as the method, and assigned to intellectual elites—i.e., themselves—the forerunner role. To reiterate, the values and model differed from colonial times, but the underlying notions were very much alike.

Against the backdrop of the interest in Korean historical subjectivity and the distress brought by what was perceived to be a deeply flawed rush to improve relations with Japan, the scrutiny of colonial historiography in earnest began in Sasanggye during the latter half of the 1960s. In January 1966, literary historian Jo Yunje urged his colleagues:

Five months later, Sasanggye published a special issue titled “A New Interpretation of Distorted History,” which examined some key tenets in the narrative of Korean history presented by the Japanese—factionalism, toadyism, heteronomy, stagnation, isolationism, etc.—and found them largely erroneous and responsible for fostering self-denigration among Koreans. The authors emphasised that the rectification of Korean history was needed in order to subjectively identify the trends in its flow, which would then lay the groundwork for other sciences struggling with the lack of reliable data on Korea.Footnote ⁶⁶ They warned that the failure to do so had in the past caused the establishment of a “wrong philosophy of life” and erroneous politics, ultimately leading to the Koreans’ falling for the Japanese idea that their country was destined to become a colony.Footnote ⁶⁷ In other words, it was necessary to eliminate Japanese elements in Korean historiography both to promote the development of independent research across disciplines and to prevent intellectual recolonisation.

Following a couple of other works targeting colonial historiography, however, the number of historical articles in Sasanggye rapidly declined and the entire magazine became almost entirely dedicated to the discussion of current politics in response to the prosecution of its editorial team. Nevertheless, those essays in the late 1960s that did incorporate history-related contents reflect strenuous efforts to offer an alternative interpretation of Korea’s path. Going through some of the last issues of Sasanggye we can observe the two main directions in which such efforts advanced.

An essay by Ryu SangukFootnote ⁶⁸ traced the genealogy of Korea’s modernisation. According to Ryu, the process began with the liberal thinking of the Korean nobility and the interest in practical knowledge among scholars of the seventeenth century. Korean modernisation was then at stake in a reformist coup and peasant revolution in the late nineteenth century as well as the 1919 movement for Korea’s independence from Japan. Modernisation also featured high on the agenda at the time of the Republic of Korea’s founding in 1948, and was finally achieved with the student revolution of 1960. Ryu explained that prior to the last event, all the attempts, including the 1948 establishment of Korea as a modern independent state, failed because they were unable to overcome entrenched feudal power structures. In regard to colonial historiography, Ryu refuted the colonial modernisation argument (the idea that Japan led Korea’s modernisation) by situating the beginning of Korea’s modernist thinking centuries before the advance of Japan into the peninsula. While recognising that Japan introduced modernity to Korea in the legal sense, he pointed out that this did not change the feudal farmer-landowner relationship.

Ryu’s rebuttal of a central colonialist discourse is noteworthy in several ways. He maintained a composed, logical tone throughout the essay and, in contrast to other nationalist writings, did not describe the exploitation or suffering of the Korean people at the hands of the Japanese. Secondly, no colonial tropes are noticeable in his article, except for Asian despotism, which Ryu mentioned along with humiliation, fascism, and communism as the dangers that the new generation of Korean intellectuals overcame with the April 1960 Revolution.Footnote ⁶⁹ Further, the article presented a decolonisation discourse in that it highlighted as an important achievement of the revolution the removal of Koreans who had collaborated with Japanese imperialism. On the other hand, an apparent Western bias—with roots in the colonial period—transpires in Ryu’s laborious struggle to identify periods corresponding to feudalism, absolute monarchy, and modernity in Korean history as well as in his unquestionable setting of liberal democracy as the ultimate objective of a modern nation-state. Along with other scholars who adopted this approach, he strove to demonstrate that Korea’s past met all standards—Western in origin but presented as universal—and was thus comparable and equal to that of any (Western) country.

Yi Ujae’s essay in the same issueFootnote ⁷⁰ exemplifies another alternative, the people’s history, which narrated the history of Korea as that of the incessant struggle of common Koreans against injustice and domination, first by the nobility and court of Joseon, then by the Japanese, and after liberation by the corrupt upper classes who usurped power. While neither the universalist nor people’s history approach was entirely new—both demonstrate parallels with nationalist historiography of the early twentieth century and socioeconomic historical writing that emerged in the 1930s—the latter continued the nationalist resistance discourse more consciously. One of the leading writers of people’s history, Yi Gibaek, for example, pointed to the importance of learning from the achievements of the pioneers of such writing, such as Sin Chaeho and Choe Namseon, who “proposed the perspective on Korean history that ideologically buttresses the self-awareness of Koreans as a nation.”Footnote ⁷¹

In the 1970s and 1980s, after Sasanggye closed down, the two approaches observed above would crystallise into the two great streams of historical thought in the public sphere. While the people’s history provided an inspiration for the democratisation movement, the universality stream scholars introduced the Korean readership to “seeds of capitalism” and other internal development theories via the magazine that picked up Sasanggye’s baton, Changjak-gwa bipyeong.

Conclusion: Decolonised Enough?

In the two decades crucial for building the newly established Republic of Korea, Sasanggye functioned as an epistemic crucible, introducing novel ideas, revising older ones, and exerting influence beyond the intellectual sphere, into the public domain. Its editorial team and contributors were emblematic of the post-liberation spirit. Educated under Japanese colonial rule, they were eager to take advantage of the sudden influx of new ideas and information that followed the lifting of colonial constraints. Voracious readers and translators, they introduced the Korean public to various discourses, offered critical commentary, and debated how—and in what ways—Korea should learn from or adopt foreign models.

Yet the ambition to build a sovereign modern state did not translate into an immediate delinking from colonial epistemology in Mignolo’s terms. As this study has shown, the decolonial project that emerged in post-liberation Korea was fragmented and ambivalent. Japanese epistemic structures were swiftly displaced—but not entirely dismantled—while US-centred norms and assumptions became the new referents of modernity and legitimacy. Decolonial transformations that did take place were partial and uneven, unfolding alongside processes of re-entanglement with both residual and newly forming modes of epistemic coloniality. What initially appeared as rupture often masked continuity, and efforts to overcome colonial subjugation were constrained by limited cognitive and institutional tools to discern the workings of coloniality in knowledge production.

This was particularly true in the domain of historical knowledge. During the early years of Sasanggye, its contributors rarely saw the study of Korea’s past as relevant to the urgent task of national reconstruction. As a result, interest in Korean history—not to mention in decolonising it—would not fully emerge until the end of the 1950s. When efforts to dismantle colonial discourses and construct a more authentic, “subjective” perspective gained momentum in the 1960s, they were driven as much by mounting apprehension about recolonisation, triggered by the normalisation talks with Japan, as by the accumulation of intellectual insights into colonial epistemology. Even as intellectuals began to argue that Korea had progressed through the same historical stages as the West but in its own way, the decolonial project in historical knowledge was still incomplete. Key colonial epistemes persisted, largely unnoticed, and the proposed alternatives often reworked resistance discourses from the colonial era rather than break free from colonial frames. In this sense, the decolonial reorientation of Korean historiography remained fragmentary and partial.

Thus, the trajectory of historical thought in post-liberation Korea was initially shaped by the gap between the desire for decolonial transformation and the capacity to detect and contest colonial epistemology. What emerges, then, is a phase prior to the epistemic delinking Mignolo envisions: a stage at which the aspiration for epistemological sovereignty is in its nascency, while the capacity to identify and critically interrogate the presence of colonial epistemes has yet to form.

The limited ability of Sasanggye writers to extricate themselves from colonial historiography stemmed in part from the myopia of the colonial education they had received, and in part from unresolved colonial trauma—exacerbated by the lack of a meaningful reckoning with the aftereffects of Japanese rule. Domestically, institutions were reconstructed atop colonial-era foundations, and many former collaborators remained in positions of power; diplomatically, Korea struggled to assert an equal footing in relations with its former coloniser. At the same time, the delayed recognition of residual coloniality reflected the overwhelming epistemic dominance of the US, whose influence shaped the political and intellectual landscape of post-liberation Korea. Orientalism—embedded in both Japanese and American systems of knowledge—continued to inform perceptions of Korea, contributing to the persistence of colonial frames even in attempts to overcome them. More fundamentally, decolonial efforts were constrained by the conditions of the Cold War: the nature of Korea’s liberation and alignment with the US, the prioritisation of anti-communism amid national division, the Korean War, and ongoing rivalry between North and South. As noted above, many Sasanggye writers who had crossed from the North dedicated considerable effort to articulating an alternative to Marxist historical materialism—yet their thinking still bore its imprint. In this context, the Cold War inundated the Korean intellectual field with knowledge from a single, new hegemonic source—the US—and limited the range of available options.

In the broader process of twentieth-century decolonisation, South Korea shares key affinities with other East and South Asian societies that gained independence at the end of World War II, even as it occupied a distinctive position as a former colony of a non-Western empire. Throughout Asia, hybrid postcolonial—and increasingly decolonial—figures, moulded by colonial education and situated at the nexus of politics and epistemology, played central roles in the reimagining of national histories,Footnote ⁷² while the formation of post-liberation knowledge systems also exposed them to new forms of epistemic domination by emergent global powers. In South Korea’s case, however, the intensity and singularity of American influence—epistemic as much as political and institutional—bears closer resemblance to Taiwan or Cold War Western Europe than to other decolonising nations in Asia. Korea’s location on the frontline, rather than the periphery, of the Cold War meant that alignment with the US brought considerable resources and opportunities—but also disrupted the potential for deeper epistemic decolonisation. It delayed political reckoning with colonial legacies, fostered the uncritical adoption of new dominant frameworks, and encouraged the instrumentalisation of history for nation-building, thereby further obscuring indigenous epistemologies.

Given that historiographies evolve from accumulated past experiences and their interaction with the present, the complete eradication of colonial knowledge is, of course, unattainable. The ideal type of decolonisation should therefore involve a reconstitution in which colonial epistemes become but one of many coexisting perspectives—no longer dominating the mainstream nor haunting the present. As this article has shown, the knowledge production system shaped under Japanese colonial rule underwent a dramatic transformation after liberation, but rather than drawing from diverse sources or engaging with local epistemic traditions, this transformation was driven by the rapid, largely uncritical adoption of American frameworks. In this light, the supposedly advantageous conditions of Korea’s decoloniality—a long precolonial history of nationhood and relatively short colonial rule—proved less helpful than one might expect. The Cold War, more than anything, became the decisive factor in shaping the trajectory of epistemic development and the limits of historical reimagining.

Important changes have taken place since the 1970s, especially with democratisation, economic advancement, and the end of the global Cold War. South Korean intellectuals are now free to speak without concern for censorship or fear of damaging national interests. Many colonial epistemes have been displaced, though others persist—by now so deeply woven into everyday life that attempts to undo them have proven counterproductive. The improved ability to identify such epistemes, along with the growing desire to rethink Korean knowledge systems beyond the inherited colonial-modern matrix, signal meaningful progress. Korean scholars are now actively experimenting with alternative frameworks, from inter-Asian referencing to the construction of regional systems of knowledge, in efforts to reposition Korea (and other non-Western societies) outside Western paradigms. The neocolonial dominance of American knowledge has waned, even as its legacy remains palpable. South Korea today is thus forging a path toward epistemological sovereignty—one that acknowledges colonial entanglements while drawing creatively from diverse genealogies of thought.

Yet it would be premature to declare Korean historiography decolonised. When in March 2023 President Yoon Suk Yeol announced that, for the sake of “building future-oriented ties” with Japan, a Korean government-run foundation would compensate victims of wartime forced labour mobilisation, a massive protest campaign broke out in Korean academe. Although the reasons for sustained animosity between Korea and Japan are complex and span domestic, bilateral, regional, and global dimensions, the incident reveals how important colonial entanglements remain in Korea’s public and intellectual life—reminding us that historical issues rooted in coloniality can resurface at any moment, rekindling fundamental debates about history, national identity, and the meaning of decolonisation itself.