Hangul had been existence for a long time, but it took the Japanese colonization of Korea and the establishment of a Japanese-style public education before it really took off. For the most part, Koreans outside the aristocracy were illiterate prior to the 1900s. One of Japan's goals in their colonization of Korea was to create a docile populace that was accepting of Japanese rule. Since the former aristocracy was obviously opposed to Japanese rule, the Japanese ended up looking to derive support from the peasantry. To that end, the Japanese created a mandatory public education system in Korea in the style of those in Japan. In line of the Japanese use of their hiragana and katakana alphabet, the Japanese popularized the Hangul alphabet instead. Having achieved literacy among the populace, the Japanese taught them a version of Korean history that basically said that Japan had a legitimate rule over Korea, and the Koreans should accept it without complaint. Up until the assimilation efforts in the 1930s, the Koreans were kept at arms length by the Japanese (as the Japanese thought of themselves as being superior to the Koreans intrinsically) so as a result the Korean alphabet thrived as the Japanese made no real effort to force Koreans to learn Japanese before the rise of the militarist government.