Category: Japanese Language

“Even Dreams Must Be in Japanese”: Imperial Japan’s Chilling Wartime Propaganda for Korean Assimilation

2025-04-23

153

These propaganda cartoons, serialized in 1943 during the height of Imperial Japan’s war mobilization, were aimed at the Korean audience.

Japanese Language

Propaganda cartoons from 1943 depict cheerful Koreans enjoying Imperial Japanese rule as they are sternly warned about eavesdropping Western spies

2025-04-15

183

These propaganda cartoons, serialized in 1943 during the height of Imperial Japan’s war mobilization, were aimed at the Korean audience.

Japanese Language

How Korean numbers (하나,둘,셋…) are related to Japanese numbers (hito-, futa-, mit-…), as explained by 1938 Japanese linguistics article from colonial regime

2024-02-05

451

I ran into this interesting linguistics article in the June 1938 issue of “Chōsen” (Korea), published as an official propaganda

Korean Workers

Korean staff at Keijo Nippo took over news operations from their former Japanese bosses in Nov 1945 and then sent this message to Korean readers announcing continued publication in Japanese for the time being until Korean typefaces are ready for use

2023-09-25

414

For my second post that I am making during my stay in Korea, I thought it would only be fitting

Japanese Language

Colonial officials claimed ‘Korean must naturally stop being spoken as a result of the spread of Japanese’ ‘no words in Korean can express the essence of the Japanese spirit in a straightforward way’ ‘Korean will one day be regarded as just another local dialect like the Kyushu dialect’ (June 1943)

2023-03-22

502

In June 1943, Keijo Nippo ran a long series of roundtable discussion articles, where colonial interior ministry officials gathered to

Japanese Language

Governor Koiso likened Korea to a disabled body whose brain (regime) could not talk to the limbs (Korean people), so an ‘exclusive use of Japanese’ policy was forced on Koreans, starting with Seoul city employees who were labeled ‘inferior’ and ‘weak-willed’ if they still spoke Korean at work

2023-01-15

594

In 1943, Governor-General Koiso kicked off the new year by intensifying his campaign to further restrict the public spaces in

Police

‘Jeon’ became ‘Takamatsu’ and ‘Park’ became ‘Masaki’: 1940 profiles of Korean families in Seoul adopting Japanese names to purportedly honor their Korean roots, be accepted by Japanese neighbors, to better interact with the public, to instill a ‘spirit befitting Imperial subjects’ in their children

2023-01-02

534

This 1940 article profiles two Korean families in Seoul who adopted Japanese names: the Jeon family, which became the Takamatsu

School

Colonial authorities abruptly abolished Korean translations of the neighborhood meetings of Patriotic Groups in May 1942 as part of a ‘radical treatment’ to make Koreans speak Japanese, equating the inability to speak Japanese to a serious medical illness

2022-12-18

524

This May 1942 article announces that Korean translations of the regular meetings of the Patriotic Groups are hereby abolished. The

Japanese Language

Korean writers in the ‘Korean Literary Association’ became puppet voices for Imperial Japan, praising the 1942 switch from Korean to Japanese language in Korean literature and declaring, ‘Korea has come to share the mission of transmitting the spirit and culture of Japan to all regions of Asia’

2022-11-29

668

Thus far, we’ve seen how Koreans of various walks of life, including comfort women and ‘model Korean families’ who mainly

Japanese Language

Young Korean teachers teach children the ‘will to fight and destroy the U.S. and Britain’ and the Imperial Way of Labor where ‘every stalk of grass and every tree’ is connected to the Japanese nation and everything in the villages is ‘all solely dedicated to the Emperor’ (Sosa, 1943)

2022-10-10

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This is a ‘feel-good, heartwarming’ story of a novice teacher who gradually gets used to teaching her fourth grade students