Assimilation as a colonial policy sought the integration of colonized peoples into the colonizer’s cultural, social, and political institutions. The philosophy that drove this practice emphasized the Enlightenment ideas of such thinkers as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who wrote in his The Social Contract and Discourses that men “who may be unequal in strength and intelligence, become every one equal by convention and equal right.”
The idea of assimilating colonized peoples is most associated with the French. The image of multiracial French national assemblies elicits the belief that this colonial power welcomed representatives from throughout its empire to the colonial homeland as a people equal in stature to their own citizens. The French policy of assimilation, which involved the practice of direct rule over the peoples to which it was applied, stood in contrast to the English, whose colonial practices involved indirect rule and the maintaining of native political, social, and cultural institutions.
These characterizations are somewhat misleading. Recent research suggests that the French assimilated few of their colonial subjects, and when they did it was often as “native,” rather than French, citizens. French standards prevented many colonial subjects from inclusion in French society, for they required that the subject must speak French, convert to Catholicism, and reject traditional (“barbarian”) customs. In contrast, the English introduced a successful policy of political, rather than cultural, assimilation for colonized peoples residing in neighboring territories. Following the passage of Britain’s acts of union, the Welsh, Scots, and Irish all closed their local parliaments and sent representatives to the British Parliament.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, social Darwinists began to attack the practice of assimilating colonized peoples. In France, the social scientist and physician Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) led a movement that criticized the policy’s primary tenet: that “inferior” peoples could be civilized to join the ranks of the enlightened. Assimilation as an institution, he argued, was “one of the most harmful illusions that the theories of pure reason have ever engendered” (Betts 2005 [1961], pp. 64-69).
German advocates of “scientific colonialism” offered similar arguments after their country began expanding into Africa. However, in neighboring Alsace and Lorraine, the German government did employ assimilation as an administrative approach. These examples suggest that the success of assimilation policies was contingent on form (political over cultural) and familiarity (geographic and ethnic proximity).
Early Japanese examples of an administration practicing assimilation predate many of the above examples. One of the first Japanese attempts at assimilation began in the late eighteenth century when encroaching Russian traders and explorers encouraged the Tokugawa government (1603-1868) to assimilate the indigenous Ezo (Ainu) peoples of present-day Hokkaido.
This experiment was aborted soon after the Russian threat abated, but it was revived following the 1868 Meiji restoration. On both occasions the Japanese government trained the people of Hokkaido in the Japanese language and encouraged them to adopt Japanese attire and cuisine. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Japanese government herded the people of Hokkaido into schools to instruct them in the Japanese language and farming techniques. The aim was to encourage their settlement into communities that would replace their traditional nomadic hunting-and-gathering way of life. The Japanese government employed similar practices in the Ryukyu kingdom (present-day Okinawa) after gaining control of this archipelago in the 1870s.
Whereas the Japanese could claim (albeit weakly) of having held suzerain relations over Hokkaido and Okinawa during the Tokugawa period, its later colonial acquisitions included territory that had either been part of another empire (Taiwan) or had held outright sovereignty (Korea). This situation, and the backlash that assimilation faced at the time, encouraged the Japanese to choose their policy of colonial administration with caution after it acquired Taiwan following its victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895).
Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi (1841-1909), requesting opinion papers from top foreign advisors, was advised by the French representative to assimilate peoples in colonized areas. The British advised Japan to introduce an indirect policy that maintained the colonized people’s traditional customs. Deputy Foreign Minister Hara Takashi (1856-1921) advised in his opinion paper that Japan follow the practices used by the English in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, the French in Algeria, and the Germans in Alsace and Lorraine: assimilation.
By 1910, when Japan annexed the Korean Peninsula, assimilation had been designated as the state’s colonial policy by imperial decree. The Japanese government even declared this policy as its administrative strategy in the South Pacific islands that it acquired from Germany during World War I (1914-18).
Differing from the French rhetoric of assimilation’s universal applicability, the Japanese justified their adoption of this policy in bilateral terms relating to the cultural and historical similarities that the colonizers shared with the peoples they colonized. Japan’s leaders argued that ethnic similarities would bring them success in implementing this assimilation policy in places where European colonizers had failed. These arguments referred to ancient times, when the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese peoples resided as a single people on the Asian continent. Through migration and physical separation, they developed their separate identities.
These arguments also pointed to other similarities in, for example, religion and language, which the Japanese shared with the subjugated peoples. By the time the Japanese had incorporated the South Pacific islands into the empire, assimilation was regarded as Japan’s official colonial policy, even if the people to be colonized shared little in common with the colonizers. Nor should it have mattered, for whether the colonized people were Korean, Taiwanese, or Micronesian, the Japanese regarded them as imperial subjects, rather than Japanese citizens.
Despite Japan’s rhetoric of assimilation, the colonial policies that the country implemented advanced segregation. Education presents a representative example of this result. Japan probably built more schools in its empire than any other colonial power, yet most of these schools consistently segregated the colonized from the colonizer. Mark Peattie’s description (1988) of the education system in Japan’s Nan’yo (South Seas) territories demonstrates continuity with practices in Japan’s other colonial possessions—a widespread system in which students were kept segregated from those attending Japanese expatriate schools.
The Korean example reflects the situation found in Japan’s other colonies. Here Japanese schools limited Korean enrollment to around 10 percent; the Japanese enrollment in Korean schools was less than 5 percent. The schools established for the colonizers were better endowed financially and offered the students better conditions in which to study. Gaining entrance to Japanese schools did not necessarily advance assimilation, however. Koreans and Japanese who studied together frequently formed separate clubs and lived in different residence halls.
This segregation reflected the ethnic zones of the Korean capital, Seoul. Koreans and Japanese tended to reside in separate parts of the city. Groups of colonized peoples who organized to promote assimilation in Japan’s colonies did not achieve much success. The Japanese ordered one such association in Taiwan to disband.
Neither the European nor Japanese assimilation practices managed to successfully integrate colonized peoples into the colonizer’s society. Resistance by those to be assimilated only partly explains this; resistance by expatriate colonizers to accept the colonized as equals also prevented the success of assimilation policies.
