From Bruce Cummings "The Legacy of Japanese Colonialism in Korea" in Myers and Peattie The Japanese Colonia Empire, 1895-1945 (1983)
Nothing about the colonial period makes easy reading for Koreans... This collective revulsion at the memory of the colonial experience explains why there is so little serious research by Koreans on the period, and why one Korea indulges in the myth that everyone resisted and the other in a myth that no one collaborated. this is why one encounters the curious pattern of surface rejection in toto of everything that the Japanese did, combined with de facto adoption of many Japanese practises. Korea's march to modernity coincided with imperial aggression and colonial exploitation: this is hard enough for any people to take. But aggression and exploitation also coincided with fairly remarkable development and a learning-by-doing experience of how education, military, polity, and economy can be modernized. thus the Japanese set up a love-hate conflict that has gnawed at the Korean national identity ever since. (pp. 481-482)The period from 1935 to 1945 was when Korea's industrial revolution began and it produced the usual characteristics: uprooting of peasants from the land, the emergence of a working class, widespread population mobility and urbanization. Because the Japanese accomplished industrialization from above, the social change acompanying this revolution was greatest in the lower reaches of society. In other words, Korean labor was what was needed, and the Japanese got it mostly in Korea's southern, rice-producing, populous provinces. Very large population movements occurred within and without Korea in this period. Irene Taeuber estimated that by 1945 as much as 11.6 percent of the Korean populationwas outside Korea, most of it in Japan and Manchukuo, and that fully 20 percent of all Koreans were residing abroad or in a province other than their native one... (pp. 489-490)