Korean Food Resistance Under Japanese Occupation

What happened

Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910 after years of escalating control, and ruled it until Japan's defeat in 1945. The colonial regime was harsh and extractive from the start, but the period from the late 1930s onward, during Japan's wartime mobilization, brought an intensified policy of forced assimilation (naisen ittai, "Japan and Korea as one body"). This included the suppression of the Korean language in schools and public life, the forced adoption of Japanese-style names (Sōshi-kaimei, from 1939–1940), compulsory worship at Shinto shrines, and the conscription of Koreans as laborers and soldiers — and, most notoriously, the forcing of tens of thousands of Korean women and girls into sexual slavery for the Japanese military as so-called "comfort women." The colonial economy was reoriented to serve Japan, including large-scale rice extraction: Korean rice was exported to Japan in such quantities that many Koreans were pushed onto cheaper millet and barley imported from elsewhere, eating less and worse while their own best grain fed the colonizer.

The food connection

The suppression of Korean identity extended into the cultural sphere of food, and Korean foodways became a domain of quiet persistence and resistance:

• Kimchi as identity marker. Kimchi — fermented vegetables, today most iconically napa cabbage with chili, garlic, ginger, and salted seafood — was already ancient and central to the Korean table. Under a colonial regime working to make Koreans into imperial subjects, the continued daily making and eating of kimchi, and the maintenance of the distinctly Korean fermented, spice-forward, banchan-centered way of eating, was a daily reaffirmation of being Korean. (Note for accuracy: the chili pepper itself arrived in Korea only after the Columbian Exchange, from the seventeenth century, so the red, spicy kimchi is "only" a few centuries old; but the fermentation tradition and kimchi's centrality long predate the occupation, and during the colonial period it was unambiguously a Korean cultural anchor.)
• The private table as a redoubt. With public Korean identity under pressure — the language suppressed, names changed, shrines imposed — the home kitchen and the family table became one of the spaces where Korean identity could be lived without translation. Cooking and eating Korean food at home was not organized political resistance, but it was identity preservation under a regime bent on erasure.
• Food and the independence movement. The colonial period was punctuated by Korean resistance, above all the March First Movement of 1919, a nationwide independence demonstration brutally suppressed. The maintenance of Korean cultural distinctiveness — in language, in custom, and in food — was part of the broader substrate of national feeling that made such movements possible and that survived the colonial attempt to extinguish it.

The human cost

The cost of the occupation was vast: the extraction of resources and rice that impoverished and underfed Koreans; the conscription of hundreds of thousands of Korean laborers and soldiers; the enslavement of tens of thousands of "comfort women," whose suffering remains a raw and contested issue between the two nations to this day; the suppression of language, names, and culture; and the violent repression of dissent. Wartime food extraction meant real hunger and nutritional decline for much of the Korean population even as their land's best produce was shipped to Japan.

Political & economic context

Colonial Korea was administered for the benefit of the Japanese empire. Land surveys early in the occupation dispossessed many Korean farmers; the rice economy was reorganized to feed Japan's growing urban population; and Korean labor and bodies were mobilized for Japan's wars. The assimilation policies of the late 1930s and 1940s were an explicit attempt to dissolve Korean nationhood into the Japanese empire — making the survival of Korean cultural forms, including foodways, a matter of national continuity.

Historical legacy

The Japanese colonial period remains one of the most sensitive issues in East Asian politics, with disputes over historical memory, apology, reparations, and the "comfort women" continuing to strain Japan–Korea relations. In Korea, the survival of national identity through the colonial assault is a point of profound pride, and food is woven into that narrative of endurance. In a striking modern coda, kimchi has become a vehicle of South Korean "gastronationalism" and soft power, and there have been pointed modern disputes (e.g., over the naming of kimchi versus the Chinese pickled vegetable pao cai) in which Korea vigorously defends kimchi as specifically Korean heritage — a defensiveness rooted partly in the historical experience of cultural erasure. The kimchi-making tradition, kimjang, was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013.

Food culture legacy

The legacy is the survival and subsequent global ascendancy of a fiercely distinct national cuisine. Kimchi in particular stands as the emblem of Korean culinary identity — a food whose continuity through occupation became part of its symbolic weight. The communal autumn kimjang, in which families and neighborhoods make large quantities of kimchi together for winter, embodies the social fabric that the colonial period sought to and failed to dissolve.

Reference notes

• Related entries: Fermented & Preserved Foods (cross-reference, kimchi and the broader fermentation tradition); future entries on Korean Banchan, Chili Peppers of the World (the post-Columbian arrival of chili in Korea).
• Related cuisines: Korean.
• Cross-links: kimchi, kimjang, banchan, gochugaru (Korean chili), jeotgal (salted seafood), fermentation.
• Content advisory placement: Front-of-entry advisory for colonial occupation; flag the "comfort women" reference specifically as it concerns wartime sexual slavery.
• Editorial note: Be precise about kimchi's chronology (ancient fermentation tradition; comparatively recent chili). Treat the Japan–Korea historical-memory dispute and the kimchi/pao cai naming dispute neutrally and factually.

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