• Korean Journal of Japanese Language and Literature
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• no.80
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• pp.443-462
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• 2018

In modern Korea, the place where the Christianity was propagated served as space where the American missionaries compete with, and coexist with, the colonial bureaucrats of the Empire of Japan. In this article, we focus on the tripartite relation between the colonial bureaucrats, the foreign missionaries, and Korean people with respect to the propagation of the Christianity in Korea, and analyze the two types of the policy to separate the politics from the religion, one put forward by the foreign missionaries and the other put forward by the Empire of Japan. Furthermore, we take a particular look at the Japan Union Church, which strived to propagate the Christianity in Korea during the colonial era, and point out the way in which the policy to separate the politics from the religion became a contradiction and then became govermentized. Through these analyses, we clarify how the Empire of Japan utilized the concept of the policy to separate the politics from the religion in order to disseminate the Christianity, and reveal how this concept was perceived by the local people in the colonized Korea.