Populist Collaborators

A new history of Korea's Ilchinhoe (Advance in Unity Society), a social and political reform organization whose members ardently embraced Japanese imperialism in Korea and its "civilizing" mission.

Yumi Moon is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.

With this monograph, Yumi Moon plugs one hitherto gaping hole in the history of the years that preceded Japanese annexation. Additionally, she offers a sophisticated argument on collaboration that will prove useful for those examining this behavior over the colonial period, as well as Korea's post-liberation handling of this colonial dreg.

Anders Karlsson:

This is a bold and ambitious study that tackles the sensitive issue of collaborationand pro-Japanese groups in Korea in the period before the annexation of the countryby Japan in 1910....The study provides a rich and convincingpicture of the Ilchinhoe's 'populist collaboration', and shows how the challenge toroyal power that the Ilchinhoe constituted not only was a reaction to thechallengesKorea faced in the late nineteenth century but also had its roots in social developments and state policies in the preceding period.

Marie Seong-Hak Kim:

The value of this book is evident. The Ilchinhoe's record expertly studied by the author is sure to elicit much debate on pro-Japanese collaboration, a topic that still raises a strong reaction in Korea's historical memory.Populist Collaboratorssheds important light on the Korean responses to the changes during the protectorate period and the interactions between various political groups. It expends siginificantly our knowledge of this pivotal period in Korean history.

Vipan Chandra:

The most notorious Korean organization, denounced by many (then and today) for its treasonous role in the 1910 Japanese annexation of Korea, was the Ilchinhoe, translated by the author of this full-fledged study as Advance in Unity Society. Yumi Moon's is a bold and meticulously argued study, with incontrovertible evidence filling up all its substantive chapters.... Moon has written a very nuanced work that is sure to be the subject of many animated discussions in Korean history circles.

Don Baker:

Moon crafts a persuasiveargument that the Ilchinhoe and its members were not merely trying to cozy up tothe Japanese in the hope of gaining benefit when the inevitable happened and theJapanese gained control of the peninsula. She mines the reports of government officials investigating local unrest as well as petitions submittedon behalf of Ilchinhoe members to local government offices to unearth the specificsof peasant complaints against the government. Moon powerfully counters the traditional nationalistic slant of much of modernKorean historiography with her portrayal of the collaborationist Ilchinhoe, and thereligious community out of which it emerged.. giving us a broader view of how Korea changed theway it did over the first half of the twentieth century.

Dongyoun Hwang:

Challenging the dominant line of modern Korean history, Moon demonstrates the existence of local and social divisions within Korea during the last years of the Chosŏn dynasty in dealing with the nation's crisis.... this revisionist book deserves scholary attention for an expanded debate over the meaning and complexity of collaboration in eastern Asia.

John Whittier Treat, Yale University, author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb:

Yumi Moon's revisionist history of the 'treacherous' Ilchinhoe is an important contribution to the wave of new scholarship on collaboration in colonial Korea, a topic of interest not only to historians of Korea and Japan but to anyone who wants to understand how nation-states were formed worldwide under the weight of modern empires. Populist Collaborators deserves to be read by all of us wondering why events in the peninsula now more than a century old are more controversial today than ever.

Alexis Dudden, author of Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States:

Yumi Moon gives us a trenchant and thoughtful history of the so-called Pro-Japan faction during the early days of Japan's colonization of Korea. Deeply researched and provocatively transnational in scope, Moon's Populist Collaborators breaks down many lingering binaries and should be read and discussed as widely as possible.

Hyung-Gu Lynn, AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research, University of British Columbia, author of Bipolar Orders: The Two Koreas since 1989 and editor of the journal Pacific Affairs:

Populist Collaborators is one of the strongest books in memory published in English on modern Korea history. Every chapter is based on engagement with a range of primary sources and provides new information and new interpretations for scholars in Korea, Japan, and the West. Yumi Moon makes a convincing argument that an organization—the Ilchinhoe—that has been widely seen as having actively collaborated with Japanese imperialism is in fact better understood as populist and reformist.