식민지 조선에서의 ‘소작’ 개념의 정치

Abstract

The practice of agricultural policies by the colonial power in the late Chosun Dynasty began by forcibly implanting the idea of “tenancy” which was created in Japan during the Meiji period, and within this category, they engaged with the classification, investigation, and inscription of the existent Korean customs. Within this process, the idea of “tenancy” replaced traditional Chosun’s unique land lease system, “homogenizing” the land lease customs altogether. The rights of the farmers which were similar to shared ownership, even though it had been expanding in the traditional society, were rejected and deprived by the legislative and investigative practices by the colonial state. Within the framework of “tenancy” reinforced by the colonizer, these rights were degraded down to simple obligatory land-lease or long-term tenancy under the provision of the Meiji Civil Code (1898). Furthermore, as many remaining case records suggest, the legal status of leasehold rights in colonial Korea was poorly secured comparing to that of Japan. As a judicial counselor of Japanese Resident-General of Korea, Dr. Ume Kenjirō conducted investigations regarding Korea’s land customs, and he was also one of the three figures who oversaw the drafting of Meiji Civil Code. He had a legislative framework that would attempt to create colonial law based on Korea’s own customs, yet this framework was nothing but a political practice that tried to conceal the fact that these were only “selected customs” useful for the colonial practices. The analyses of The Collection of Civil Customs Inquiry for Trial (Minsagwansuphoedaphyjip, Minjikanshukaitoishu) reveal that the colonial state held trials based on the “selected customs,” and The Collection of Precedents of Japanese High Court of Korea (Chosungodungbeopwonpallerok, Chosenkotohoinhanreiroku) sheds lights on the fact that the institutionalization of Meiji Civil Code did take place in colonial Korea. The fact that these political practices were the medium for coercive implantation of the concept of “tenancy” within the colonial society was not only forgotten and concealed but it also soon became understood as self-evident and even necessary (“naturalized concept”). The agricultural policies of the colonial state were indeed constructed upon this “epistemological violence.”