PoliticsMay 1925

Peace Preservation Law

Japan extended to Korea its Peace Preservation Law punishing groups that sought to change the national polity or deny private property. It became a tool against both socialism and the independence movement.

After the March First Movement, socialist ideas arrived under the influence of the Russian Revolution, and the Korean Communist Party was founded in Seoul in April 1925. The Peace Preservation Law, enacted in Japan that year, took effect in Korea in May. Independence activity, as an attempt to change the "national polity" (the imperial system), was punished under it too.

The maximum penalty was raised to death in 1928, and in 1941 preventive detention allowed people to be held even after serving their sentences. Socialists shaped the farmers’, workers’, youth and women’s movements and joined nationalists to form the Singanhoe.

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States and rulers at the time: Korea under Japanese rule — Governor-General Saitō Makoto
Japan · ruling power — Emperor Taishō

Before and after

Earlier: 1925 Founding and First Arrests of the Korean Communist Party
Later: 1925 Japan’s General Election Law

Themes that include this event

Republican China and Imperial Japan1912 – 1949
The age when the Republic of China, born of the 1911 Revolution, passed through warlord division, the May Fourth Movement, the United Front and the Northern Expedition, fought Japan’s invasion and split in civil war — as Japan moved from Taishō democracy through the Manchurian Incident and military coups to the war in China and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and colonized Korea resisted through the March First Movement and armed struggle