일제하 조선총독부의 공문서 분류방식

The Classification System of the Official Documents in the Colonial Period

In this paper, I explained the dominating/dominated relationship of Japan and Colonized Korea by analysing the management system of official documents. I examined the theory and practices of the classification used by the office of the Governor-General for preserving official documents whose production and circulation ended. In summary, first, the office of the Governor-General and its municipal authorities classified and filed documents according to the nature and regulations on apportionment for the organizations. The apportionment of the central and local organs was not fixed through the colonial period and changed chronologically. The organization and apportionment of the central and local organs reflected the changes in the colonial policies. As a result, even in the same organs, the composition of documents had differences at different times. The essential way of classifying documents in the colonial period was to sort out official documents which should be preserved serially and successively according to each function of the colonial authorities. The filing of documents was taken place in the form of the direct reflection of organizing and apportioning of the function among several branches of the office of the Governor-General and other governmental organs. However, for the reason that filing documents was guided at the level of the organs, each organ's members responsible for documents hardly composed the filing unit as a sub-category of the organ itself. Second, Japan constructed the infrastructure of colonial rule through the management system of official documents. After Kabo Reform, the management system of official documents had the same principles as those of the Japan proper. The office of the Governor-General not only adopted several regulations on the management of official documents, but also controlled the arrangement and the situation of document managing in the local governmental organizations with the constant censorship. The management system of documents was fundamentally based on the reality of colonial rule and neglected many principles of archival science. For example, the office of Governor-General labelled many policy documents as classified and burnt them only because of the administrative and managerial purposes. Those practices were inherited in the document management system of post-colonial Korea and resulted in scrapping of official documents in large quantities because the system produced too many "classified documents".