Have always wondered why Christianity found such fertile ground in South Korea.

Many people link the growth in Christianity in Korea to increased involvement of the Americans in South Korea in late 20th century.

But Americans were also heavily involved in Japan around that period. The number of Christians in Japan though is nowhere close to that in Korea(1% in Japan vs 30% in Korea).
Both were nations devastated by war, yet missionaries were spectacularly successful in Korea alone.

Over the next few days, I plan to explore the reasons for this.

Today I plan to take a look at Korean society before the war, in fact much before it, around the turn of the twentieth century.

Korea was a society ruled by a Confucian bureaucracy essentially, where the Monarch delegated everyday working of government to highly skilled bureaucrats, selected after an extremely rigorous group of national civil service exams, called the Kwago.

This was a system that had lasted over a thousand years, and likely for a good reason. Korea had been largely stable, and had resisted invasions from Japan, particularly in 1592 and 1598.
But apparently cracks were developing in the system.

There appeared to be widespread dis-satisfaction with how the country was being run. A major rebellion occurred in 1812

The implications of this rebellion weren’t only political, but also religious. People apparently felt let down by the religious order at that time, which they perceived to be a corruption of the ideals of their ancestors. The rebellion later birthed a religion

What caused further instability was the Japanese forcing the Koreans to open their borders in 1876. (Quite similar to Americans forcing Japan to open up in 1853)
This led to a 3 way split in the bureaucracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%E2%80%93Korea_Treaty_of_1876

The first group were the conservatives who wanted nothing to do with the outside world. They wanted a return to the Confucian ideals of the past.

Interestingly, Korea had already had an experience with Christianity(Catholicism) at that time. Some bureaucrats had discovered Christianity and converted willingly, without any proselytizing(no precedent of this in Japan)

These native converts them asked for Priests to be sent to them, which the church did(of course).
These catholics in Korea did as catholics are wont to, ie, spit on local traditions.

The catholics also did other things, including but not limited to, destabilizing society by reaching out specifically to women, acting as spies for western governments(the author here dismisses them offhandedly, which is expected given his religious orientation)

Coming back to the conservatives, they had already realized what western(read christian) influence on Korea meant based on history, and wanted nothing to do with it. (Please be cognizant of the author’s bias against traditional Korean society)

The second group were essentially centrists, they wanted to adopt western technology, but not western religion(This happened in Japan). But they were unsuccessful.

The third group were the most interesting. The author calls them radical liberals(traitors would be more apt I believe). They wanted to copy western civilization, but as a byproduct of copying the western faith.

Their interest was in becoming Christian first, and modernizing Korea second. This is a class that was missing in Japan, most probably because any thoughts of replacing the Divine Emperor(this is linked to traditional Japanese religion) would have been met with death.

This shows that Korea was in a sense fertile land for christianity, as a part of the elites, the ruling bureaucracy were so receptive to this western faith.

I shall continue this thread tomorrow.