Asia Pacific Modern, 12. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xviii, 299 pp. (Figures.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-520-27655-0.
Assimilating Seoul is an example of what Prasenjit Duara called “rescuing history from the nation.” Instead of the commonplace story of Korea under Japanese colonialism—the original annexation, the cruelties of military rule, the 1919 uprising, and the emergence of the Korean left and right—Todd Henry gives us a cityscape full of interactions between residents of neighbourhoods, varieties of acceptance of Japanese influence, and arenas in which ambitious Japanese programs met, and were altered by, Korean resistance. What emerges is a detailed study of Korean and Japanese identity and adaptability in the colonial setting between 1910 and 1945, followed by an insightful epilogue about the long-term influence of the experience on the city and its people ever since.
In Assimilating Seoul, Henry offers studies of different types of engagement: spiritual, civic, and material. He discusses “contact zones,” areas of the city where Koreans and Japanese mixed and affected each other. Always in the background is the hypocrisy of the Japanese intention to assimilate Koreans by declaring them Japanese subjects without ever actually allowing them status as full citizens. Their program in Seoul enables Henry to show how this was done in civic life: for example, via the conversion of Korean palaces into public spaces—a zoo, assorted museums, exhibition halls, and fairgrounds—and the invitation to Koreans to interact with Japanese spirits at Shintō shrines.
The effects of Japan’s geographical reorganization of Seoul—the major streets, the imposing new buildings, the transportation system and much else—remain visible today. They were permanent changes, and Henry’s epilogue will delight anyone familiar with what has happened, for example, to the Kyŏngbok Palace, City Hall, and the main railroad station. It is still visible in Seoul’s “north-town” (Pukch’on, the district housing Korea’s former elites) and the still-extant landmarks of what once was Japantown (around Honmachi, now renamed Ch’ungmuro), Koganemachi (Ŭlchiro), Meijimachi (Myŏngdong), and Nandaimondori (now the Bank of Korea and Shinsegye Department Store, originally the Mitsukoshi Department Store). Beginning with the Japanese planners, the main north-south avenue was widened and straightened from the colonial headquarters/Kyŏngbok Palace all the way past City Hall, South Gate, and up to the Korea Shrine, the headquarters of Japanese spirituality in Korea. This avenue has been enlarged many times and now encompasses a space reminiscent of Tiananmen Square or the Washington Mall. In this way the Japanese purpose of creating great spaces for civic engagement continues as a goal of successive South Korean governments.
Though the details in Assimilating Seoul are fascinating for anyone who knows the city, Todd Henry is interested in mapping the overlapping lives of Koreans and Japanese. He emphasizes the role of Japanese settlers, a population easily neglected in favour of studies about the Japanese regime. Many common Japanese were living in Korea before it became a colony in 1910, and the character of Seoul was much affected by their conflicts and accommodations with Koreans at all levels of colonial society—in markets, schools, the police force, neighbourhoods, and even intermarriages.
One of Henry’s major discussions is of Shintō in Korea, namely the construction of the Korea Shrine (Chōsen Jinja) on the slope of Namsan (South Mountain) in 1925. This was a symbol of state Shintō across the city’s central valley from the massive Government-General building, the colonial headquarters occupying the front precincts of the Kyŏngbok Palace. Since 1898 there had been a smaller Seoul Shrine for the use of Japanese residents. The opening of the Korea Shrine on higher ground created a controversy within the Japanese resident community, since its purpose was to bring in and include Koreans who, as imperial subjects, were now meant to worship there. Analyses of the critical problem of Shintō in Korea have always turned on how it affected Koreans and on the distinction between “sect Shintō,” which was religious, and “state Shintō.” The colonial authorities tried to sell Koreans on the idea that paying respects at Shintō shrines was a civil, not religious, rite: a civic duty. Henry’s point is an interesting one: that Japanese in Korea themselves were conflicted about whether Koreans belonged, or could possibly participate in, Shintō. His chapter on this problem is an important addition to our understanding of the shrine controversy as a political problem in the colony.
The epilogue brings the Shintō problem forward into the postwar era by detailing the near-instantaneous disestablishment of the Seoul and Korea Shrines by both Japanese (seeking to remove them before they could be desecrated by Koreans) and Koreans who then tried to re-sacralize their locations by erecting statues of patriotic Korean figures including An Chung-gŭn and even Syngman Rhee. The main shrine buildings on Namsan, for example, were used by Presbyterians for their theological seminary in the 1950s, and there were massive outdoor Easter sunrise services on the site for several years.
Civic reorganization of Koreans by Japanese included public health measures aimed at reducing the amount of disease rampant in Seoul’s back alleyways and neighbourhoods. Henry refers to the myriad narrow passages that still honeycomb the blocks of the old central city of Seoul as “capillaries,” noting the failure of Japanese efforts to develop the city in the inner neighbourhoods. Hygiene was a laudable goal for the regime as it tried to “civilize” the Koreans. However, apart from the force majeure employed by the government to appropriate private land as it cut fine new thoroughfares through Seoul’s huge city blocks, the effects of Japanese planning were scarcely felt in the back alleys.
Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul will be required reading for anyone studying the Japanese colonial period in Korea, for scholars of colonialism in general, and for students wanting to look beyond purely nationalist narratives for understandings of the past.
Donald N. Clark
Trinity University, San Antonio, USA