This paper aims to examine the influence of the minganhak on the formation
of knowledge culture in colonial Korea. The conflict between the gwanhak and
the minganhak was pervasive across the Japanese empire. In Japan, the gwanhak
meant official academism contributing to the nation’s goal of economic
wealth and military strength, whereas the minganhak meant to pursue universal
values and academic diversity. In colonial Korea, however, the two types of
academism had different characteristics from the Japanese counterparts. The
gwanhak in the colony meant the learning concerned with colonial policies,
namely, partial but intensified form of the gwanhak in the metropole, whereas
the minganhak in the colony was the imagined form of the gwanhak as role
and system to run modern state. The colonial minganhak was marked by the
continued political endeavor to remind the readers of the lost sovereignty and
its resurrection. In colonial Korea in the 1920s, the magazine Gaebyeok functioned
the foremost agency in forming and developing the colonial minganhak.