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Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
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Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945

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Assimilating Seoul, the first book-length study written in English about Seoul during the colonial period, challenges conventional nationalist paradigms by revealing the intersection of Korean and Japanese history in this important capital. Through microhistories of Shinto festivals, industrial expositions, and sanitation campaigns, Todd A. Henry offers a transnational account that treats the city’s public spaces as "contact zones," showing how residents negotiated pressures to become loyal, industrious, and hygienic subjects of the Japanese empire. Unlike previous, top-down analyses, this ethnographic history investigates modalities of Japanese rule as experienced from below. Although the colonial state set ambitious goals for the integration of Koreans, Japanese settler elites and lower-class expatriates shaped the speed and direction of assimilation by bending government initiatives to their own interests and identities. Meanwhile, Korean men and women of different classes and generations rearticulated the terms and degree of their incorporation into a multiethnic polity. Assimilating Seoul captures these fascinating responses to an empire that used the lure of empowerment to disguise the reality of alienation.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 15, 2014
ISBN9780520958418
Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
Author

Todd A. Henry

Todd A. Henry is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.

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    Assimilating Seoul - Todd A. Henry

    A

    BOOK

    The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint honors special books in commemoration of a man whose work at University of California Press from 1954 to 1979 was marked by dedication to young authors and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies. Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables UC Press to publish under this imprint selected books in a way that reflects the taste and judgment of a great and beloved editor.

    The Korea Foundation has provided financial assistance for the undertaking of this publication project.

    The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

    Assimilating Seoul

    ASIA PACIFIC MODERN

    Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor

    Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg

    Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih

    The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health,19101945, by Theodore Jun Yoo

    Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, by John D. Blanco

    Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, by Robert Thomas Tierney

    Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan, by Andrew D. Morris

    Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, by T. Fujitani

    The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter

    A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State,19001949, by Tong Lam

    Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of1923, by Gennifer Weisenfeld

    Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan, by Jonathan E. Abel

    Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea,19101945, by Todd A. Henry

    Assimilating Seoul

    Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public

    Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945

    Todd A. Henry

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    Berkeley•Los Angeles•London

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

    University of California Press, Ltd.

    London, England

    © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

    First Paperback printing 2016

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Henry, Todd A., 1972–.

    Assimilating Seoul : Japanese rule and the politics of public space in colonial Korea, 1910–1945/Todd A. Henry.

    pagescm. (Asia Pacific modern ; 12)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-27655-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

    ISBN 978-0-520-29315-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

    ISBN 978-0-520-95841-8 (ebook)

    1. Seoul (Korea)—History—20th century.2. Seoul (Korea)—Ethnic relations—History—20th century.3. Public spaces—Social aspects—Korea—Seoul—History—20th century.4. Koreans—Cultural assimilation—Korea—Seoul—History—20th century.5. Japanese—Korea—Seoul—History—20th century.6. Korea—History—Japanese occupation, 1910–1945.I. Title.

    DS925.S457H462014

    951.95—dc232013038505

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16

    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

    Contents

    List of Illustrations

    Note on Place Names

    Preface and Acknowledgments

    Introduction. Assimilation and Space: Toward an Ethnography of Japanese Rule

    1.Constructing Keijō: The Uneven Spaces of a Colonial Capital

    2.Spiritual Assimilation: Namsan’s Shintō Shrines and Their Festival Celebrations

    3.Material Assimilation: Colonial Expositions on the Kyŏngbok Palace Grounds

    4.Civic Assimilation: Sanitary Life in Neighborhood Keijō

    5.Imperial Subjectification: The Collapsing Spaces of a Wartime City

    Epilogue. After Empire’s Demise: The Postcolonial Remaking of Seoul’s Public Spaces

    Notes

    Selected Bibliography

    Index

    Illustrations

    1.Late-fourteenth-century design of Hanyang

    2.Late-nineteenth-century plan for Hwangsŏng

    3.Keijō plan of 1913

    4.Keijō plan of 1919

    5.Land readjustment plan for western Chongno

    6.First phase road network plan, 1928–33

    7.Prayer and play at Seoul Shrine

    8a.Geisha in shrine procession

    8b.Kisaeng in shrine procession

    9.Kisaeng in shrine procession (top), boy scouts carrying portable shrine (middle), and Korean men observing festival procession (bottom)

    10a.Korean procession

    10b.Hybrid ceremonial outfit

    11a.Building One on illustrated exhibition grounds

    11b.Special Forestry Hall’s obstruction of Kŭnjŏng Hall

    12a.Promotional poster from exhibition of 1915

    12b.Promotional poster from exhibition of 1914

    13.Pure Korean style of exposition corridor in 1931

    14.Modernist style of North Kyŏngsang Province Hall

    15.Caravan offering roadside hygiene lectures

    16.Exposition tower uniting eight corners of world under one roof

    17.Korean men revering sacred flame

    18.Korea-based students bowing before Imperial Palace (Tokyo)

    19.Leaflet promoting household worship

    20.Korean-style bow before Shintō shrine

    Note on Place Names

    If one accepts my argument that the public spaces of the Korean peninsula have been the object of considerable attention and a source of perennial contestation, then it should come as little surprise that the nomenclature of these spaces has witnessed a similarly turbulent history. The city that is the focus of this book, for example, boasts several names depending on the regime that controlled it. These include Namgyŏng (Koryŏ dynasty, 918–1392), Hanyang (Chosŏn dynasy, 1392–1910), Hwangsŏng (Great Han Empire, 1897–1910), Keijō (Kyŏngsŏng; colonial period, 1910–45), and Seoul (1945–present). Although some of these names for the capital were used interchangeably as categories of practice, Assimilating Seoul deploys them as categories of analysis in order to capture the historicity of this city. As a matter of principle, I have made an effort to honor Korean names for places that predated the colonial period, while using Japanese terms for those that colonial authorities came to control in the first half of the twentieth century. However, where Koreans tended to dominate—in the northern village of Chongno (J: shōro; 鍾路), for example—I have taken the liberty of using indigenous terms. As this example shows, one can deploy at least three versions of the same name for one single place. The following chart, organized alphabetically according to the Korean term and providing English names when they are referenced in the text, is intended to guide the reader through the complex and contested topography of Seoul that follows.

    KEY SITES

    Preface and Acknowledgments

    In the process of writing this book, I have realized anew that some, if not all, history is autobiographical. This preface is thus a way for me both to acknowledge that truism and to thank the many individuals whom I have met along the arduous but rewarding path of producing a scholarly monograph. I am often asked in South Korea and Japan as well as in the United States and elsewhere why a white American-born scholar—more specifically, of Jewish ancestry—would decide to write a book about the Japanese rule of colonial Korea and its capital city. My usual answer to that ethnocentric question is to say, Well, of course! Now, let me tell you my story. As are all serendipitous experiences, the path leading to this study began in unexpected ways. Looking back on that journey with the perspective of hindsight, I can now say that it started by befriending several Japanese exchange students living in Corrientes, Argentina (where I was an exchange student), and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (where I attended high school). Hoping to better interact with these friends and their compatriots, I chose to minor in Japanese language and literature at The George Washington University, a decision that subsequently took me to Osaka as an exchange student between 1993 and 1995. A childhood neighbor (the Florsheims) with business connections to an Osaka merchant (the Yasudas) led me to pursue a homestay in the southern part of the city, a meeting ground for the country’s disenfranchised ethnic and class minorities, including burakumin outcastes, resident Koreans, paupers, and gangsters, to identify just a few. That experience—of being surrounded by nearly invisible minorities, but ones clearly known and implicitly despised by at least some of my Japanese friends due to their unfortunate residence (i.e., my own neighborhood of Hanazono-chō)—forced me to think seriously about the spatial dimensions of power relations, including my own positionality as an upwardly mobile queer Jewbu (Jewish-Buddhist) and, of course, much more. It also led me to master the Korean language and to become a specialist of the peninsula’s recent past, especially that of one of its most important contact zones. Assimilating Seoul is one attempt to understand the social and cultural relations of Japanese rule through the city’s lived spaces. I also hope that this book can be read for what it says about wider themes animating the critical humanities, ones that ultimately pertain to my life and those of others both like and unlike me.

    As this brief description of the project’s serendipitous genesis suggests, the many people and institutions who have made it possible are numerous and far-flung. Words alone cannot do justice to the immense debt of gratitude I feel for those who have guided, taught, supported, and loved me along this wonderful journey of discovery. I first want to thank Sonja Ivanovich, my high school social studies teacher, and my college Japanese instructors, Kimura Takeo and Fukui Nanako, for opening my horizons well beyond the boundaries of the US nation-state. All of them remain role models for my pedagogical and scholarly work. Iwasaki (formerly, Katō) Wakako, Tateiwa Tarō, Shimada Yōhei, Kuwahira Eiji, and their respective families have been loyal friends and generous hosts for more than twenty years. At Sophia University in Tokyo where I was a Japanese government–supported master’s student from 1996 until 1999, I had the good fortune of working with Miwa Kimitada, Takahashi Hisashi, and Kate Nakai Wildman, all of whom taught me much about modern Japan, especially in relation to its East Asian neighbors. At UCLA, where I completed my PhD in 2006, my advisors were and continue to be unfailing sources of wisdom, support, and friendship. The early loss of the brilliant and inspiring Miriam Silverberg, the person who opened the door for me to become a professional historian, has been an especially painful burden to bear, but she would be happy to know that her feisty spirit lives on in me and so many of her students. John Duncan and Namhee Lee expanded my horizons of Korean history, pulling me backward and forward into the pre- and postcolonial periods. I thank both of them for their generosity and support over the years, and I am proud to claim myself as part of the Westwood faction of Koreanists. Edward Soja turned me on to questions of space and place, and his work continues to provide great inspiration. I also want to thank past and present UCLA professors Fred Notehelfer, Herman Ooms, Michael Bourdaghs, Seiji Lippit, Tim Tangherlini, Mariko Tamanoi, Gi-Wook Shin, Rodgers Brubaker, and Michael Salman for their warm-hearted encouragement and intellectual camaraderie over the years. My graduate student friends, many of whom are some of the leading scholars in their respective fields, have made the transition to young professor all the more satisfying. They include Serk-bae Suh, Aimee (Nayoung) Kwon, Youngju Ryu, Chris Hanscom, Mickey Hong, Ellie Choi, Sonja Kim, the late Sophia Kim, Charles Kim, Min Suh Son, Hijoo Son, Seung-ah Lee, Kim Jŏng-il, Kim Hyŏng-uk, Howard Kahm, Paul Cha, Paul Nam, Paul Chang, Jennifer Jung Kim, Jane Kim, Kelly Jeong, Stella Xu, Makiko Mōri, Emily Anderson, Kristine Dennehy, Elyssa Faison, Michiko Takeuchi, Ann Marie Davis, John Swain, Haeng-ja Chung, Hiromi Mizuno, Eiichiro Azuma, David Eason, Hye Seung Chung, David Scott Diffrient, Eng-beng Lim, and Sung (Eun) Choi. Along the way, I have been fortunate to befriend other supportive colleagues, including Greg Pflugfelder, John Treat, Micah Auerback, Jordan Stein, Robert Chang, Michael Robinson, Jun Yoo, Eunjung Kim, Lisa Kim Davis, Jennifer Yum, Kim T’ae-ho, Yumi Moon, Dafna Zur, Eugene Park, Jenny Wang Medina, Jina Kim, Suk-Young Kim, Michael Berry, Rosalie Fanshel, Rachael Miyung Joo, Janice Kim, John DiMoia, Watanabe Naoki, Jordan Sand, Sarah Thal, Sharon Hayashi, Stephen Miller, Pak Yun-jae, Stephen Epstein, Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Helen Lee, Mark Driscoll, Leo Ching, Matty Wagehaupt, Jinhee Lee, Vladimir Tikhonov, Kyong-mi Kwon Kwon, Joy Kim, Hyung Il Pai, Sunyoung Park, Kyung Moon Hwang, Nicole Cohen, Charles Armstrong, Koen De Ceuster, Chŏng Ta-ham, Se Woong (Ken) Koo, Roald Maliangkay, Kim Ŭn-sil, Yim Ji-hyŏn, Kim Sang-hyŏn, Kyung Hyun Kim, Su Yun Kim, Hyung Gu Lynn, Ted Hughes, Steven Chung, Yŏn-mi Kim, Raja Adal, Mark Caprio, Ken Ruoff, and Pak Tae-gyun.

    Two years of dissertation research with grants from the Korea Foundation and the Fulbright Commission allowed me to interact with a tremendous coterie of Japanese and South Korean scholars. At Seoul National University, individuals who were especially supportive of my work include my teachers of Korean history, Kwŏn T’ae-ŏk, Yi T’ae-jin, and Chŏng Kŭn-sik, and their talented students, Ch’oe Pyŏng-t’aek, Chŏng Sang-u, Yŏm Pok-kyu, Pak Chun-hyŏng, Kim Tae-ho, Kim Paek-yŏng, Chu Yun-jŏng, Kim Su-jin, Park Se-hun, Ko Tong-hwan, and Chŏn U-yŏng. I also want to thank An Ch’ang-mo, a fellow student of Seoul who, through his well-guided tours, has taught me much about the city’s geography, history, and culture. At Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in Humanities, my deepest gratitude goes to Mizuno Naoki who continues to be one of the most knowledgeable and generous supporters of my work, including with his last-minute help gathering many of the images that appear in this book. Takagi Hiroshi, Komagome Takeshi, and Yi Sŭng-yŏp also assisted me in developing ideas about Japanese rule and colonial Korea, while Yamamoto Tatsuya became a bosom buddy. Other Japan-based scholars who have aided me at various points include Matsuda Toshihiko, Itagaki Ryūta, Hashiya Hiroshi, Kawase Takuya, Hiura Satoko, Suga Kōji, Aoi Akihito, Narita Ryūichi, Yamaguchi Kōichi, and Matsutani Motokazu. I also want to acknowledge my heartfelt gratitude to the many librarians, archivists, and other individuals who helped me find documents and images across Japan, South Korea, and the United States. I am especially indebted to Ellie Bae, for her many visits to Japan’s National Diet Library, and to the staffs of UCLA, UCSD, UC Berkeley, Colorado State University, Harvard University, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, the University of Seoul, the Seoul Museum of History, the National Library of Korea, Kyoto University, Tokyo University, Hokkaidō University, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, and the Saitō Makoto Memorial Library. I thank Benjamin Pease for the maps that adorn this book and for making their production a rewarding process.

    As a junior scholar, I have been supported by a number of important institutions and individuals. Although largely from afar, Andre Schmid and Tak Fujitani, now colleagues at the University of Toronto, have been close confidantes and indefatigable supporters at every juncture of my career. Michael Kim of Yonsei University also generously offered his time, knowledge, and laughter. At Colorado State University, my first academic job, I benefited greatly from the support and friendship of numerous colleagues, especially Ruth Alexander, Mark Fiege, May Fu, Elizabeth Jones, Anne Little, Thaddeus Sunseri, and Gamze Yasar. A year respite from teaching, a leave supported by the Korea Foundation, allowed me to rework a long and clumsy dissertation into a more tightly argued and temporally expanded book. I thank the staff of Harvard University’s Korea Institute, Susan Lawrence, Myung-suk Chandra, and Catherine Glover, and their counterparts at the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies for their support. The intellectual team of David McCann, Carter Eckert, and Sun Joo Kim on the Korea side and Andrew Gordon, Ian Miller, and Ted Bestor on the Japan side made my stay at Harvard especially productive, as did Carol Gluck’s visit to Cambridge for my manuscript workshop. That year also allowed me to form new relationships with a fantastic group of postdoctoral fellows, including Se-mi Oh, Jonathan and Jessamyn Abel, Chelsea Foxwell, Ayu Majima, Trent Maxey, and Jun Uchida. My new academic home at UCSD has been an excellent place to finish this first project and begin new ones. I am especially thankful to Seth Lerer, John Marino, Pamela Radcliff, Nayan Shah, Joe Esherick, Cathy Gere, Mark Hendrickson, Nancy Kwak, Weijing Lu, Natalia Molina, Patrick Patterson, Paul Pickowicz, Rebecca Plant, Jeremy Presholdt, Sarah Schneewind, Joe Hankins, Lisa Yoneyama, Lisa Lowe, Ari Larissa Heinrich, Ping-hui Liao, Jin-Kyung Lee, Eun-Young Jung, Stephen Haggard, Jong-sung You, Jeyseon Lee, Patrick Anderson, and David Serlin. In the final stages of revisions, Susan Whitlock came to my editorial rescue, encouraging me to revisit what seemed like completely ossified prose but what soon became an enjoyable process of (re)writing. I also want to thank two reviewers of my initial manuscript for their very useful feedback and encouragement as well as the editorial staff of UC Press, especially Reed Malcolm, Stacy Eisenstark, Chalon Emmons, and Robert Demke, for guiding me through the uncharted waters of book publication. Subvention support from the Association for Asian Studies, the Korea Foundation, and UCSD’s Office of Research Affairs helped offset production costs.

    Parts of this book appeared, in earlier versions, as articles or book chapters and are being reprinted here with permission. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 are based, in part, on the following publications, respectively: Respatializing Chosŏn’s Royal Capital: The Politics of Japanese Urban Reforms in Early Colonial Seoul, 1905–19, in Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography, edited by Timothy Tangherlini and Sallie Yea (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007): 15–38; Sanitizing Empire: Japanese Articulations of Korean Otherness and the Construction of Early Colonial Seoul, 1905–19, Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 3 (Aug. 2005): 639–75; and Cheguk ŭl kinyŏm hago, chŏnjaeng ŭl tongnyŏ hagi: Singminji malgi (1940 nyŏn) Chosŏn esŏ ŭi pangnamhoe, Asea yŏn’gu 51, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 72–112.

    Last but certainly not least, I reserve the most heartfelt thanks to the members of my immediate family for the love and support they have shown me over the years. I cannot imagine my life without them. Although no longer with me on this earth, my grandparents, Henrietta, Mack, Muriel, Harry, and Charlie, always remind me from where I came and where I am going. My uncle Tom and aunt Jane, both formidable intellectuals in their own right, have been wonderful companions and listeners to my ideas. My brothers Greg and Doug have always accepted me for what I do and who I am. I could not ask for more from my siblings, and I hope that they feel the deep love I have for them and their families. Through thick and thin, my parents, Lyle and Nancy, have formed the emotional pillar of my life. Their labor of love for me is without conditions and knows no limits. Their commitment to all aspects of my life is the thing that I strive to achieve in my own relationships, and it is thus to them that I lovingly dedicate this book.

    Seoul

    May 2013

    INTRODUCTION

    Assimilation and Space

    Toward an Ethnography of Japanese Rule

    In the fall of 1925, after nearly fifteen years of planning and over five years of construction, the Government-General, the colonial state that had ruled over Korea since its annexation by Japan in 1910, unveiled an imposing Shintō shrine atop Namsan (literally, South Mountain). Although the mountain had marked the southern edge of Hanyang, the former capital of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), Namsan was quickly becoming the geographic center of a growing metropolis known in Japanese as Keijō (Kyŏngsŏng; present-day Seoul), the empire’s showcase city on the peninsula.¹ Until its destruction in 1945, Korea Shrine—whose deities (Amaterasu, the mythical ancestress of the Japanese polity, and Emperor Meiji, Japan’s first modern monarch [r. 1868–1912]) symbolized the ideology of an unbroken imperial line—was one of the most powerful public sites in colonial Korea and one to which millions of residents, from both Keijō and throughout the peninsula, paid their respects. These visits of worship, compulsory for all able-bodied residents of Keijō during the Asia-Pacific War (1937–45), formed part of an ambitious project to turn the colonized population into dutiful, and ultimately loyal, subjects of the emperor. However, Koreans remained economically and politically disadvantaged in comparison to most of their privileged Japanese counterparts, exemplified by their relatively low class position and underrepresentation in the higher ranks of administration. Fearing the negative outcomes of such blatant discrimination, Ogasawara Shōzō, a Japanese proponent of Shintō, had tried unsuccessfully to install native deities at Korea Shrine in order to more effectively assimilate (tonghwa; J: dōka) the colonized masses. However, his experience visiting the shrine’s unveiling ceremony on October 15, 1925, demonstrated that assimilation might prove difficult, if not impossible. As he recalled:

    At approximately eight o’clock in the evening, I left my inn wearing a light, unlined garment and a half-length, Japanese-style coat. Using the front approach, I paid my respects to the gods [J: sampai shita]. Both Japanese and Koreans continually climbed the stone stairs. However, when they arrived in front of the offertory hall, the former removed their hats and bowed, whereas the latter turned around and went home. I stood in front of the offertory hall for more than an hour. But, not one Korean paid his or her respect to the gods. According to our common sense, paying one’s respects to the gods means making a ceremonial bow and offering a prayer. Koreans do not pay their respects before the gods; I could [thus] confirm that they [merely] look around [J: sankan].

    What is the cause for this [behavior]? Will Korea Shrine end up being a shrine only for the Japanese?²

    The creation of a government shrine atop Namsan aimed at directing the thoughts and actions of the colonized population captures the central premise of this book, namely, that Keijō’s public spaces are an important, if overlooked, crucible for examining the development of Japanese rule. In this particular case, Shintō practices of emperor worship functioned as the outward signs by which critical observers like Ogasawara attempted to judge the loyalty of Koreans. Accused of simply looking around Namsan, colonized visitors purportedly lacked the reverence attributed to their Japanese counterparts, who, like Ogasawara, respectfully prayed before the newly installed deities of Korea Shrine. This failure of assimilation—a central, albeit vaguely defined, policy of Japanese rule—suggested the need for the colonial state and its proxies to repeatedly examine and train Koreans according to what Michel Foucault once called a regime of truth.³ As extant records and subsequent memories of shrine visits demonstrate, many members of the colonized population resented being subjected to intrusive forms of surveillance that grew out of racialized claims that they were inferior. However, with the exception of some Christian protestors for whom emperor worship equated idolatry, most Koreans came to perform the rituals expected of them at this powerful public site, especially after wartime mobilization began in 1937.⁴

    Despite these outward gestures of compliance, Ogasawara’s apprehension also reveals that, at least as of 1925, most of the colonized population did not act, let alone think, according to official expectations of reverence. Indeed, forging the critical link between the venerated ancestors of the Japanese imperial house and those of individual Korean clans remained a significant, if not insurmountable, obstacle to assimilation. Although positioned more as intractable objects of Japanese rule rather than as self-governing subjects of colonial power, the nonchalant Koreans captured in Ogasawara’s anxious remarks point to a contentious politics of place that a critical history of public space must also take into consideration. The government monument atop Namsan did, after all, command a spectacular view of the city below and, as a popular site of tourism, Korea Shrine often drew colonized residents for leisure visits, some to experience its natural surroundings and others perhaps simply to impress a romantic date.⁵ As such, the site’s attractions, like the other public spaces discussed in this book, did not always advance the assimilatory ideology of Japanese rule—in this case, the site created unrealistic expectations that Korean subjects would worship the imperial deities of a nation that, just fifteen years earlier, had forcefully occupied the peninsula and colonized its inhabitants.

    JAPANESE ASSIMILATION AS CONTESTED EXPERIMENTS OF COLONIAL GOVERNMENTALITY

    Following the complex nuances of such colonial encounters, Assimilating Seoul attends to both the structures of Japanese rule and, to the extent possible, the multivocal agency of the subjects who filled its cracks. Building on efforts launched by Kim Paek-yŏng, Jun Uchida, and others, my work seeks to disaggregate colonial authority by examining how various forms of assimilation—spiritual as well as material and civic—operated on the grounds of colonial society and in its public spaces.⁶ In particular, I view official efforts to redirect the divine affiliations (spiritual), productive energies (material), and collective ethics (civic) of colonial subjects—the criteria deemed necessary for them to become Japanese—as contested experiments of colonial governmentality. This analytical framework was first developed to study liberal societies in the modern West, but it was subsequently adapted to examine those of its imperial territories. Typically, studies of liberal governmentality have focused on the late-eighteenth-century shift from sovereignty—that is, a centralized, coercive, and unlimited form of power aimed at protecting the security of the monarch’s territory—to a more diffuse, persuasive, and limited form of power known as governmentality.⁷ In this new paradigm, lassiez faire concerns over political economy and its population led modern states to act indirectly as managers of individual freedom and encouraged citizens to become increasingly self-governing, a feature of liberal rule now famously described as the conduct of conduct.

    In a comparative study of the American and Japanese empires, Takashi Fujitani has argued persuasively that the Government-General did not always act as if most colonized Koreans could become reliable subjects of self-government, at least not until wartime mobilization necessitated that they be more fully included in the biopolitical concerns of the late colonial state.⁸ When viewed from this macroscopic level, the Government-General failed to extend its subjectivizing efforts beyond the confines of most Japanese settlers and some bourgeois Koreans, and it only tentatively adopted the inclusionary strategies of nation-building simultaneously deployed in the metropole. However, a microscopic analysis of the city’s infrastructure, Namsan’s Shintō shrines, the expositions of Kyŏngbok Palace, and local hygiene campaigns demonstrates how public spaces became targeted points of intervention aimed at transforming nonelite inhabitants from disobedient objects of rule into self-regulating, if not self-governing, subjects of power. For their part, subaltern actors, although virtually excluded from political institutions, used these same sites according to their own attitudes and interests, many of which did not converge with those of the state. In this sense, the city’s public spaces became a dynamic meeting ground between, on the one hand, the ideas and policies that set the parameters of Japanese rule and, on the other hand, the practices of individuals who occupied, visited, and inhabited those lived spaces.

    To approach the colonial politics of place-making, my analysis of Keijō’s public spaces builds, in part, on previous studies of Japanese assimilation, but reframes them in two important ways. The first involves a considerable widening of what this term meant in colonial practice. To date, most studies have understood assimilation in the narrow context of things one might label distinctly Japanese, limiting their discussion to the realm of what I am calling the spiritual.⁹ To be sure, mandatory visits to Shintō shrines and classroom education aimed at inculcating imperial ethics and the national language (Japanese) constituted some of the most important manifestations of assimilation.¹⁰ However, practices aimed at reorienting subjects’ spiritual affiliations toward the emperor constituted only one part of what colonial officials regularly referred to as dōka (tonghwa), or assimilation, as well as tōgō (tonghap) and yūgo (yunghap), or integration and incorporation. Indeed, both explicit invocations of assimilation and implicit references to its combinatory logic can be found in a wide range of modern discourses and practices that included, in addition to spiritual matters, the colonial economy, politics, and, of course, culture. Heeding Komagome Takeshi’s incisive reminder that scholars should specify the inherently nebulous contours and shifting meanings of assimilation, my analysis includes practices of rule—the promotion of industriousness at spectacular expositions and the development of hygienic ethics in neighborhood campaigns, for example—that might otherwise be captured under the more universal rubric of modernization.¹¹ To varying degrees, authorities in all modern empires sought to manage the highly uneven process of development for the benefit of their own ethnic and class interests. In Keijō, such forms of capitalist exploitation not only forced Koreans to imbibe the modern gospel of productivity and cleanliness as subordinated and nonthreatening members of the labor force but also encouraged them to become loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor.¹²

    In addition to expanding the conceptual boundaries of assimilation, my study recasts these transformative projects by analyzing their ideological underpinnings. To date, most studies have tended to adopt top-down approaches, using elite debates or state policies as the main criterion by which to assess this amorphous but powerful strategy of rule. In the field of education, for example, scholars of state policy have assessed the role that common schools played in teaching the national language and inculcating reverence for the imperial house. Focusing on the colonial nature of these institutions, they exposed the difficulty of acquiring the necessary skills for upward mobility, an area of discrimination that nationalist critics worked to eliminate.¹³ Similarly, scholars of intellectual debates have highlighted the attitudes of Japanese theorists whose ideas undergirded these discriminatory policies. Although equally top-down, these studies demonstrated how elite writers sought to justify foreign domination in the eyes of colonized subjects and in relationship to Euro-American powers.¹⁴ Although successful in explaining the intellectual roots and institutional forms of assimilation, they have not fully explored how these ruling tactics aimed to reorient the everyday practices of colonized Koreans and, to a lesser extent, Japanese settlers. By bowing before Shintō shrines and engaging in other performative rituals, imperial subjects did, to varying degrees, seek empowerment by becoming Japanese, only to discover that the promises of inclusion in the imperial nation-state went largely unfulfilled. As a result, they often found themselves in a frustrating predicament, which Dipesh Chakrabarty has, in another colonial context, elegantly described as the waiting room of history.¹⁵ That officials left most Koreans (as well as women, leftists, the lower classes, and other peripheral members of Japan’s empire) uncomfortably suspended between the duties of subordinated subjects and the rights of enfranchised citizens lies at the very crux of assimilation—a ruling strategy that offered them the lure of modernity’s rewards alongside their bewildering deferment.¹⁶ Assimilating Seoul, a title meant to capture the nearly impossible process of becoming Japanese, focuses on this contradictory and experimental project of rule—one that was neither fully implemented by government officials nor wholeheartedly embraced by colonized subjects.

    By elucidating the limitations of top-down analyses, I do not mean to suggest that scholars ignore the ideas behind and policies for assimilation, since both remain important for understanding the governing rationalities of Japanese imperialism. However, in order to move beyond the highly ideological rhetoric of government officials and elite theorists, it is necessary to denaturalize the authority of the colonial state. All too often, Korean-language scholarship has uncritically assumed the Government-General’s omnipotence, framed under the simple, yet misleading rubric of ilche (literally, imperial Japan). By contrast, the chapters that follow will subject efforts at differentially incorporating Koreans into the larger imperial community to an ethnographic analysis of specific projects that, in their various spiritual, material, and civic guises, projected the vague and contested parameters for how this multiethnic polity should develop.

    Drawing on anthropological approaches to (post)colonial state formations, I begin with the unorthodox presumption that the Government-General’s ability to integrate and to exclude the colonized population, although perhaps stable when viewed from within, was, in practice, highly variable and partial as it moved outward from its seat of authority. This disjuncture between internal coherence and external fragility gave rise to voluble discourses about assimilation that suggested ongoing reservations about the practical difficulties of incorporating most Koreans, subjects whose allegedly low level of civilization (mindo) placed them on the outer edges of the imperial community. For this reason, Japanese notions of assimilation were often supplanted by French theories of association, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, when a countervailing force of cultural rule allowed Koreans a certain amount of living space within a settler-dominated society.¹⁷ Even then, officials were often forced to call on their disciplinary proxies—especially the police but also local elites—to engage in social control in order to shore up the appearance of governmental authority.¹⁸

    This reformulation of Japanese rule shifts the analytical focus away from the a priori dominance of the colonial state to a closer examination of its contested relationships with various state and nonstate actors—relationships that, through mundane and ritual forms, helped constitute the Government-General’s presence in the lives of Keijō’s residents. That officials could project their authority in some, but certainly not all, of the city’s spaces requires that students of Japanese colonialism heed Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat’s call to "move beyond the state’s own prose, categories, and

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