One final aspect of the police role concerns the links between the police and local society via local elites. The police used the knowledge and influence of the local elites to mold the behavior of average citizens in such diverse matters as, “birth control, types of crops grown, count and movement of people, prevention of spread of diseases, mobilization of force labor and to report on transgressions. The old agrarian state which had proved capable of meeting the challenge of modernity came to be replaced by a colonial state with considerable capacity to penetrate and control the society; this state was simultaneously oppressive and efficacious. A highly centralized apex with near absolute powers of legislation and execution – and thus of setting and implementing “national” goals and pervasive, disciplined civil and police bureaucracies constituted the core of the new state.
The political practices of the Japanese colonial state in Korea were brutally authoritarian, Korean newspapers were either suspended or heavily censored, political protest was met with shift retribution and political organizations and public gatherings were generally banned. To conclude, the Japanese colonialists in Korea replaced the decrepit Yi state with a centralized, illiberal state. Central decision was highly concentrated in the office of the governor-general. The governor-general’s will, reflection the imperial design and goals, was translated into implemented policies via the use of an extensive, well-designed, and disciplined bureaucracy. The new state also achieved considerable downward penetration: both the civil and police bureaucracies reached into the nooks and crannies of the society, while continuing to respond to central directives; Korean elites in the localities were co-opted into the ruling “alliance,” in the context of pervasive intelligence and surveillance by the police and the state.