Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 by Todd A. Henry (review)

Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945. By Todd A. Henry. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2014. xviii, 299 pages. $49.95, cloth; $49.95, E-book.

Assimilating Seoul provides a microscopic examination of the city of Seoul, the Chosŏn dynasty’s capital that became Keijō under Japanese rule. This is not a study of conventional colonial policies in this important city but an analysis of the “spatial dimensions of power relations” (p. xiv) in its public spaces. According to the author, public sites of Seoul, such as major thoroughfares, Shintō shrines, and palace grounds, functioned as “contact zones” between the colonizers and the colonized, and through the assimilation of these spaces the Japanese attempted the assimilation of the people living in the city. This book is grounded on the cultural theory of power in colonial discourses which postulates that physical remaking and visual representation of space in urban areas embodied colonial visions of state, society, power, progress, and so on.

Todd Henry discusses colonial assimilation initiatives in spiritual, material, and civic realms. Chapter 1 traces how the government-general sought to transform the old Korean metropolis into a colonial showcase. In the mid-1920s to early 1930s, the Japanese built the city’s infrastructure and widened roads. The architectural monuments along Taihei Boulevard (T’aip’yŏngno) came to embody colonial advancement. The author provides meticulous descriptions of Seoul’s urban planning and physical layout under colonial rule which, in this reviewer’s opinion, constitute the central merits of the book. Chapter 2 focuses on spiritual assimilation, examining how Shintō shrines built on the top of Namsan and cultural activities surrounding them were used to instill in Korean minds reverence to Japan’s religion and loyalty toward its imperial house. The colonial government organized major industrial expositions, and Koreans were urged to visit them and marvel at the economic benefits bestowed by Japanese rule. By placing the peninsula’s development within the imperial economy, explains the author in chapter 3, the Japanese tried to propagate material assimilation. Chapter 4 discusses public health campaigns and sanitary regulations that targeted crowded residential areas in Seoul. Attempts to teach Korean people Japanese hygienic ethics constituted civic assimilation. According to Henry, the combined efforts of these projects “cast an increasingly wide net of power across Keijō’s neighborhood” (p. 20).

With the onset of the Asia-Pacific War, as noted in chapter 5, the disparate projects and sites of assimilation merged, witnessing “the collapsing of sacred sites both old and new along various spatial scales” (p. 168). “Imperial subjectification” (p. 169) intensified as Japan’s prospects looked increasingly grave. Manipulation of urban space was not something unique to colonial rule. In the thoughtful epilogue, the author describes how the decolonization project in postliberation South Korea recast Seoul for its own political ideology. Korean governments creatively reused colonial buildings and sites for new nationalist agendas. Henry writes: “official projects to replace these monuments with ones befitting a liberated … peninsula have uncannily followed the Government-General in even more thoroughly subjectifying South Koreans as anti-Japanese and anticommunist subjects, while silencing their complex and unresolved colonial pasts” (p. 205).

Assimilating Seoul provides a wealth of information and brims with fresh insights. It offers perceptive observation of interactions among the city’s dwellers, both Korean and Japanese, and carefully analyzes the social and cultural implications of urban reforms. While the author’s astute coverage of Seoul’s selected spaces is admirable, one may ask whether the book’s choice of the concept of colonial assimilation as its theoretical framework, gliding through both material and ethereal spheres, is particularly helpful. The author’s focus is not on European imperialism, but his book’s spatial approach to assimilation renders reference to the European colonial context unavoidable. European imperial urban centers are the subjects of burgeoning colonial studies. Spatial assimilation in colonialism is important because it articulates evolving colonial attitudes about the relationship between non-European cultures and European civilization. Europeans...