Making sense of pro- and anti-Japanese behaviour in Tonghak

The Tonghak Rebellion is a popular anti-foreign rebellion in Korea in 1894, led by followers of the Tonghak religion, with Chŏn Pongjun, a local Tonghak leader, at its head. The imposition of Japanese influence at the head of the Korean government following the first rebellion ignited a second rebellion directed at the Japanese, which eventually crushed the rebellion at Kongju.1 With the failure of the Tonghak Rebellion and the crackdown on Tonghak by the Korean government, ideas of political reform gained currency in the now-underground Tonghak, as well as the prospect of Japanese intervention in modernisation.2 Later, the Chinbohoe was formed in 1904 on the basis of Tonghak’s religious organisation with the aim of reforming the Korean government by limited monarchical and local elites’ power, as well as to support the Japanese war effort during the Russo-Japanese war.3 In its advocacy for the Korean people’s rights and reform, Chinbohoe and Ilchinhoe, a political organisation also with the goal of political reform, merged in 1904 under the latter’s name.4

The lineage of Tonghak involvement in both the anti-foreign, anti-Japanese Tonghak rebellion, and the pro-Japanese intervention Ilchinhoe, is curious, and at first glance, contradictory. Yet in both the Tonghak Rebellion and in the later grassroot reform efforts by the Inchinhoe, these did not represent the totality of their aims and motivations, and some similarities can be found in their other stated aims. One such aim rests in a concern for the economic injustices inflicted on their grassroot supporters by the Korean government.

Commonly cited as being the demands of the Tonghak Rebellion, a list of twelve demands for reform promulgated during the middle part of the rebellion seems to suggest an overtly egalitarian and radical program for the benefit of the masses. Its authenticity is disputed, however, originating as it did from a historical novel authored by a writer sympathetic to the Tonghak cause, within a social milieu of strong socialist influences.5 Instead, a list of 14 reform demands submitted to the government during the first rebellion can be considered.6 While the overt egalitarianism that later historiography would attribute to the rebellion’s radicalism would be absent in this list of demands, the demands listed reflected a primary concern with “corrupt” local officials, and more significantly with taxes that were the concerns of its supporters. The underlying motive of the first rebellion lies separate to the anti-Japanese sentiment of the second rebellion.

Around a decade later, the Ilchinhoe engaged in a campaign of ‘tax resistance’ between 1904-1907.7 The underlying motive behind its resistance was the group’s belief in the popular control over taxes and tax administration, in conflict with the Korean monarch’s tax reforms that centralised powers onto the monarchy itself.8 The Ilchinhoe advocated for refusing to pay miscellaneous taxes, promulgated recommended changes to taxes, and brought in tax collectors that operated in parallel to the Korean monarch.9 All this was framed in the Ilchinhoe’s advocacy for ‘civilised rule’, which in their conception was consistent with their support for Japanese intervention in Korea, as Japan was considered a ‘civilising’ force in Korea.

Thus the contradiction between the anti-Japanese sentiments of the Tonghak Rebellion and the pro-Japanese aims of the Ilchinhoe is not intractable as these purposes did not constitute the totality of their group’s existence. Instead, their attitudes to the Japanese stood alongside other aims subsumed within a larger nexus of ideas and grievances about the structure of rule in Korea.

  1. Peter H. Lee, William Theodore De Bary, Yŏng-ho Ch’oe, Sources of Korean tradition (New York, 1997), pp. 262-263. [↩]
  2. Carl Young, ‘Eastern Learning Divided: The Split in the Tonghak Religion and the Japanese Annexation of Korea, 1904–1910’, in Emily Anderson (ed.), Belief and Practice in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea (Singapore, 2017), pp. 81-82. [↩]
  3. Ibid., pp. 82-83. [↩]
  4. Yumi Moon, ‘Immoral Rights: Korean Populist Collaborators and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1904—1910’, The American Historical Review, 118: 1 (February 2013), p. 29. [↩]
  5. Young Ick Lew, ‘The Conservative Character of the 1894 Tonghak Peasant Uprising: A Reappraisal with Emphasis on Chŏn Pong-jun’s Background and Motivation’, The Journal of Korean Studies, 7 (1990), pp. 165-167. [↩]
  6. Ibid., pp. 170-171. [↩]
  7. Yumi Moon, ‘Immoral Rights’, p. 33. [↩]
  8. Ibid., pp. 33-35. [↩]
  9. Ibid., pp. 35-37. [↩]