In Japan and its colonies, the crime of ‘disrespect’ was used to suppress and oppress various kinds of ‘enemies’(state or public) for disrupting –or supposedly disrupting- the Denno(天皇) order of Japan. The Joseon race, which was not Japanese in nature at all, had the potential of finding such order extremely hard to accept in either historical or cultural terms, therefore could be easily named as the enemy of the Denno.
After the China-Japan war of 1937, there was a dramatic increase in colonized Joseon, in terms of the number of people accused of ‘disrespect,’ showing the number of people charged with that crime even being higher than the number of people charged with the same crime in Japan. Many of those who were accused of such crime in Joseon were laborers working in the line of commercial production and circulation. Unlike cases in Japan, cases occurring in Joseon frequently showed slang and vulgar words being used, while underlings accusing their superiors of ‘disrespect’ or civilians accusing the authorities of ‘disrespect’ were very hard to found. Cases in Joseon show us that the Joseon people were very much frustrated with and antagonistic toward Japan and the Japanese Denno’s colonial rule of Joseon, and that they never internalized the Denno system in their hearts and social lives.
However, while the Joseon people never fully embraced the Denno system, the Denno figure itself was indeed the most powerful being in reality for the Koreans at the time, hence the concept itself had some utilities in at least some Joseon individuals’ lives. Some of the Joseon people simply boasted their private connections to the Denno to showboat themselves, while some people tried to lure investors to support their business claiming even the Denno household was behind their ventures. And some Koreans even used the Denno in folklore practices. To the Japanese population the Denno was a positive entity who would listen to people’s desires and wishes, while to the Joseon population the Denno was more known as a fearful figure who could repel ghosts, whereas the ancestral god of the Denno was a negative God who could rain diseases.
Meanwhile, as the prosecutor office and police in Joseon began to closely monitor disrespectful cases, some people intended to use accusations of such charges as a mean for personal revenge. They would launch false accusations in the form of anonymous tips filed to the authorities.