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

How did Japan incorporate Korea into its empire? How did Koreans respond to the colonial project? Assimilating Seoul offers a fresh take on these questions through a study of accommodation between rulers and ruled in the course of governing spaces in the colonial city. Todd A. Henry trains his lens on specific projects connected to the broader program of assimilation. Defining his topic this way, Henry is able to illustrate the interactions that shaped society. Koreans and Japanese responded to colonial programs in a wide range of ways. By highlighting the variable impact of colonial authority on specific spaces, Assimilating Seoul offers a challenge to nationalist histories that assume the omnipotence of the governor-general’s office. Here, modernizing projects intersected with the mundane to limit and recast colonial authority. Besides adding to our knowledge of colonial Korea, the book contributes to studies of imperialism, urban studies, and governmentality.

Henry presents Seoul’s public spaces as well-delineated stages on which the contested program of assimilation played out. The action on these stages was organized around specific areas of colonial policy, each of which formed a component of the assimilating project. The core of the book is a series of thematic case studies of urban planning, public religiosity, technological advancement, and public health. In covering these distinct areas of colonial policy, Henry demonstrates impressive mastery of disparate subjects.

By framing assimilation as an interaction played out in specific spaces, Assimilating Seoul eschews common binaries of colonial politics. The book is about responses to government projects, but the categories of collaboration and resistance hardly do justice to these complex reactions. Accommodation between government and governed, and among Koreans and settlers of different classes, shaped the course of these projects. These politics were far more mundane than nationalist histories would have us believe. Assimilating endeavors could run into difficulty not because of outright resistance but for more practical reasons. Efforts to build straight roads encountered low-income neighborhoods too tangled to reorganize. In other cases, the difficulty of raising revenue to fund projects imposed limits on authority. The interests of settler groups could also diverge from those of the state in ways that challenged the success of projects. On the other hand, the appearance of resistance could actually signify an internalization of the deeper project. In the case of sanitation projects, Korean nationalists railed at the racist categories employed by the imperialists but quietly accepted the underlying premise that ordinary subjects should sacrifice control over personal life to government health workers. Governmental authority was not uniformly effective and the causes of that unevenness lay less in ideological resistance than in the diversity of interests found in the city.

Henry’s account offers a new picture of daily life in colonial Seoul. By focusing on the mundane, Assimilating Seoul describes how grand initiatives butted up against a city of people going about their own business. The text is full of wonderful reminders of how daily life persisted in the context of imperial projects. Driven by personal, human motives, characters are found winking at the authorities. Henry introduces a Korean man casually strolling with arms behind his back, presumably bemused, at a solemn Shinto procession (pp. 74–75). Others, even less reverent, learn that the ceremony is a good opportunity for picking pockets (p. 12). At an exposition, a man pursues a woman and convinces her to leave her husband for him (p. 121). An audience turns up for lectures on hygiene practices, only for sanitation officials to discover their audience is only there for the singing and dancing performances (pp. 145–46). Seoul residents did not take colonial projects too seriously. Rather, such projects became a backdrop against which life played out. And if we are to take the perspective of those residents, as Henry urges...