structural:scholar_edition
South Korea

Modernisers in South Korea in the late 19th century were torn between the American and the Japanese models. Most of the Koreans involved were educated Christians who saw America as their ideal model of civilisation. However, most used Japan as a practical model - as an example of how a fellow East Asian country, which 30 years before was also backward, could succeed in modernising itself. At the same time, reformists' nationalist reaction against the domineering, colonial behaviour of the Japanese in Korea often took the form of an appeal to international (Western) standards of civilisation. The Western-oriented worldview of the early Christian nationalist reformers was complex, multilayered, and often self-contradictory - with 'oppressive' features not easily distinguishable from 'liberational' ones. Their idealised image of the West as the only true, ideal civilisation relegated much of Korea's traditional culture to a position of 'oriental'.