Japan’s policies in Colonial Korea promised inclusion but delivered extraction

Cutting-edge research from the Department of Economic History, LSE. Cutting-edge research from the Department of Economic History, LSE. Two landmark reforms defined this period. The Land Survey Project (1910–1918) established a modern property registry; the Campaign to Increase Rice Production (1920–1934) poured resources into canals and reservoirs. Both resembled the kind of institution-building associated with inclusive growth: secure ownership, shared infrastructure, rural modernisation. Historians of empire have long debated whether such reforms represented genuine development or naked exploitation. The evidence from Korea suggests the answer is neither—and both. Source: 朝鮮総督府土地改良部 [Land Improvement Department, Government-General of Chōsen]. 朝鮮土地改良事業要覧 [Overview of Land Improvement Projects in Korea]. December, Shōwa 5 (1930). The land survey is the clearest case. By 1917, nearly all land parcels had been registered and the vast majority of recorded owners were Korean—an apparent triumph of modernisation. But codified property rights also transformed land into collateral. Smallholders borrowed against their newly titled plots and, unable to repay high-interest loans, saw their land pass “voluntarily” into Japanese hands. There was no overt seizure; the financial system, made possible by the inclusive reform, did the dispossessing. Inclusion created the conditions for extraction. The rice campaign followed the same logic. Irrigation associations promised collective infrastructure and shared prosperity—and output did rise. Yet investment concentrated in areas where Japanese landowners were already dominant, while tenant farmers bore the levies and debts that made it possible. Contemporary Korean newspapers, theChosōn IlboandDonga Ilbo, reported in the 1920s that half of rural households had been pushed into destitution. Wages told the same story: Japanese farmers’ earnings rose with export booms; Korean wages stagnated. When the Depression collapsed rice prices, the gap narrowed only because Japanese incomes fell—not because Korean living standards improved. What makes this pattern significant is not just its historical injustice but what it reveals about institutions. Scholars from Douglass North to Acemoglu and Robinson have argued that inclusive institutions—property rights, rule of law, public investment—are the engine of economic growth. Colonial Korea complicates this picture. The same institutional forms that drive development in one context can serve as instruments of extraction in another. The difference is not the form but the political context: who controls the institution, and in whose interest it operates. The broader lesson holds beyond Korea. Property rights and irrigation canals may look like neutral tools of progress, but they carry the values and power relations of those who design them. In colonial Korea, their power lay precisely in their apparent fairness—inequality was administered in the language of modernisation. When we evaluate institutions, form is not enough. We need to ask who benefits, who bears the cost, and who holds the levers of control. Japan’s colonial legacy in Korea remains contested. Did it modernise the country or impoverish it? This research suggests the question sets up a false choice. Development and extraction were not opposites; they were intertwined. Growth was real, but so was inequality. And it is in that tension—between the promise of inclusion and the reality of exclusion—that the true mechanics of empire become visible. Sungjin Park completed his BSc Economic History in 2025. His research interests lie primarily in institutional economics and the study of how policies shape development and inequality.