Modern Korean history has often been looked upon as a long, dark chapter with the darkness eminating from Japan. This has been increasingly the view put forth in Korean education and scholarship the further Japan's rule of the peninsula fades from actual memory. Nationalism was used in post-war Korea as a useful and powerful tool to rebuild the country, and now is perhaps having the exact opposite effect: leding to many blind spots in terms of what the Japanese reign of Korea actually meant to the country, even on an academic level.

This book takes the first steps towards pulling away the entrappings of nationalism from historical inturpretation, critically examining what exactly it was the Japanese were doing in Korea from a more objective stance.

Research of this kind was too long in the coming, and it is hoped that this will not be the last to analyze an all too often misunderstood (if realized at all) part of Korean, Japanese, and East Asian history.