It is a famous fact that the Government-General in Taiwan adopted the baojia (\u4fdd\u7532) system in 1898 in reaction to a series of attacks against the Japanese. It is a method of mutual policing at the village level for the purpose of maintaining local order and preventing tax evasion. Although GGT officials explained that it was a system that they were adopting from the old Chinese dynasties, it had already been a familiar style of policing for the Japanese too since Toyotomi Hideyoshi and others adopted it to police hidden Christians and so on.<\/p>\n
I never encountered a mentioning of a similar system in the history of colonial police in Korea. For example, Matsuda Toshihiko’s recent publication, \u65e5\u672c\u306e\u671d\u9bae\u690d\u6c11\u5730\u652f\u914d\u3068\u8b66\u5bdf 1905-1945 (Japan’s Colonial Rule of Korea and the Police<\/em>. 2009), discusses how the police tried to propagate its authority to the masses (\u6c11\u8846\u5316) and how they tried to co-opt local leaders into their networks (\u8b66\u5bdf\u5316\uff09. But it does not look like there was a rule or a law about mutual policing like the baojia (\u4fdd\u7532) system.<\/p>\n It turned out that the collective responsibility system was used in tenant contracts between Japanese agricultural companies (landlords) and Korean peasants, instead. One example was the Chosen k\u014dgy\u014d gaisha, run by the Shibusawa zaibatsu family. A scholar Asada Ky\u014dji describes how the Chosen k\u014dgy\u014d gaisha established the gonin gumi <\/em>(5-person groups) system and used it as a basic unit of Korean tenant farmers. (Asada Ky\u014dji. \u65e5\u672c\u5e1d\u56fd\u4e3b\u7fa9\u3068\u65e7\u690d\u6c11\u5730\u5730\u4e3b\u5236. 1992. 161). Apparently this was a common custom among the Japanese landholders as the half-governmental Oriental Developmental Company also required five tenant farmers to register together. In Ham Hanhee’s oral interview with a farmer in Cholla Namdo, he said that the most difficult part in getting a contract with the ODC is that “he needed four sponsors who were willing to take on a collective liability for his wrongdoings.” (Hahm Hanhee, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University 1990. 82)<\/p>\n I wonder if the difference in where this collective liability system belonged somehow reflects the difference in the nature of rule in Taiwan and Korea… just a thought. Another thought is that, if it is possible that the infamous tonarigumi <\/em>system in Japan during WWII was a product of the experiences of organizing local units in the Japanese colonies… maybe?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is a famous fact that the Government-General in Taiwan adopted the baojia (\u4fdd\u7532) system in 1898 in reaction to a series of attacks against the Japanese. It is a method of mutual policing at the village level for the purpose of maintaining local order and preventing tax evasion. Although GGT officials explained that it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[219,126,211,183],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colonial-period","category-general","category-korea","category-korea-japan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-7J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6207,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions\/6207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}