Food Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1910–1945

Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and ruled it until 1945. Those 35 years changed what Koreans grew, what they could afford to eat and where they ate it. Some changes, such as new seasonings and restaurant dining, outlasted colonial rule; others, especially hunger and wartime controls, are remembered as among the hardest chapters of modern Korean food history. Historians still debate how to weigh rising farm output against what ordinary Koreans actually ate, and this page tries to set out the documented facts.

Rice for Japan

Japan's own food crisis shaped colonial farm policy. After the First World War and the rice riots of 1918, the Government-General launched the Program to Increase Rice Production (산미증식계획) in 1920. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes its aim as turning Korea into a food-supply base for Japan. A first plan (1921–1925) and a second (from 1926) funded irrigation associations, land reclamation, new rice varieties and commercial fertilizer.

Output rose, but exports to Japan rose faster. According to the Encyclopedia, the export surge came at the cost of falling per-capita rice consumption in Korea, and the shortfall was made up by greatly increased imports of millet and other coarse grains from Manchuria. Cheap Korean rice in turn depressed Japanese rice prices, prompting a backlash among Japanese farmers, and the program was halted in 1934. It was revived in 1940 to feed the army after Japan's invasion of China. For many Korean families the result was a diet in which rice, the center of the meal (see rice in Korean culture), was something they grew but did not eat.

New seasonings and new foods

Industrial seasonings arrived with the colonial market. In 1934 the Suzuki company, maker of Ajinomoto, the Japanese brand of monosodium glutamate, published Sagye-ui Joseon yori ("Korean Cooking for the Four Seasons"), a Korean-language cookbook of 52 Korean dishes. The Encyclopedia notes that it was written to sell the seasoning to Koreans; its preface praised MSG for economy, flavor, nourishment and convenience. Revised editions followed in 1935 and 1937. It sits alongside the older Joseon cookbooks as a record of how home cooking began to meet branded products.

Wheat-based snacks also took root. The Encyclopedia traces Korean pulppang, griddle cakes with red-bean filling such as bungeoppang, to molds introduced from Japan in the 1930s, which became popular in Gyeongseong (Seoul) in the 1940s and 1950s. Wheat was still a minor grain in Korea at the time, and these foods became truly cheap only with postwar flour imports (see noodles in Korean history). Chinese restaurants run by Shandong migrants spread in the same decades (see Korean-Chinese food).

Restaurant culture

A new kind of establishment, the Joseon yoriok (조선요리옥), a large Korean-cuisine restaurant for banquets, grew up in the capital. The best known, Myeongwolgwan, was opened around 1909 by An Sun-hwan, a former official in charge of royal cooking, and drew on court-style dishes. According to the Encyclopedia, after court entertainers were disbanded that year, many came to perform there. Its patrons included high Japanese and Korean officials as well as writers and journalists. An affiliated restaurant, Taehwagwan, was where the 33 signers of the March First Declaration of Independence gathered in 1919. These banquet houses helped turn court-inspired multi-course meals into restaurant dining, a line that leads to today's hanjeongsik.

War, forced deliveries and rationing

After 1937, as Japan went to war in China and then the Pacific, food was placed under ever tighter control. The Government-General closed rice exchanges and from late 1939 set up food distribution associations to control the rice trade. The Encyclopedia records that a 1939 rice distribution control law banned the market sale of rice and forced farmers to deliver much of even their household share at low prices (gongchul, 공출), while soybeans and barnyard millet brought in from Manchuria, grains normally used as animal feed, were rationed in its place. A 1943 food management law extended forced deliveries to more than forty products, including barley, cotton and bracken, and the authorities used force to collect them.

In October 1943 a single semi-official body, the Joseon Food Corporation, took over the purchase, milling, processing and rationing of staples. Its controls covered not only rice, barley, wheat and millet but starch, sweet potatoes, potatoes, noodles and bread: virtually every staple food. After liberation in 1945, the U.S. military government briefly freed the rice market, but shortages and inflation soon led it to reimpose controls.

Legacy

The colonial period left Korea with irrigation works, new crops and seasonings and a restaurant culture, but also with memories of hunger and of a harvest that belonged to someone else. Those memories shaped the postwar rice policies, flour-based campaigns and attitudes to food security described in food in modern Korea.