earticle

영어

The Japanese Government-General of Korea established the Central Research Laboratory in Seoul in order to invigorate traditional industries immediately after the forceful annexation of Korea. Unlike previous studies that only saw the Central Research Laboratory as a simple colonial apparatus, this paper would reveal active negotiations by the colonial technocrats in it within the wider context of Japanese imperialism. It examines research activities and industrial policies of the technocrats in the Central Research Laboratory in the 1910s while considering not only the ruling strategies of the Government-General but also a wide range of industrial policies in imperial Japan. In doing so, this paper explains the two seemingly contradictory strategies of industralization promoted by the technocrats in Korea. One was the industrialization of colonial Korea, aiming at trade balance between Korea and Japan by import-substitution and the other was promoting Korean raw materials for the ‘self-sufficiency’ of the Japanese chemical industry. These seeming contradictions only reflected the dual positions that the technocrats had negotiated for their institution, one as a ‘peripheral’ industrial research station within imperial Japan and the other as the only ‘central’ industrial research institute in colonial Korea. After all, their two policy lines were not just unintended contradictory strategies, but a deliberate attempt by the technocrats. Being marginalized within the Japanese bureaucratic system, these technocrats sought to increase their status and to gain more outside supports with these dual positioning of their research laboratory.