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

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

204 In previous chapters, I have shown how the spectacular modifications of public space by the colonial state and their contestations by local residents played a crucial role in the development of society and culture in Keijo - and, by extension, other areas of colonial Korea affected by the capital’s remarkable, if highly uneven, transformations. The partial upgrading of the city’s thoroughfares in radial and block forms (chapter 1), the establishment of Namsan’s Shinto - monuments and urban festivals as sites of reverence (chapter 2), the re-creation of the private grounds of Kyŏngbok Palace into a public classroom promoting material “progress” (chapter 3), and the use of neighborhood activities to produce an everyday civic morality centered on hygienic modernity (chapter 4) were just some of the many spatial interventions that undergirded colonial rule. To be sure, government officials and local proxies controlled the project of transforming Keijo - from the royal capital of an extinguished dynasty into a modern city of the Japanese empire, aiming to reorient Koreans’ attitudes from an allegedly parochial loyalty to clans and the ethnonation to an expanded identification with a multiethnic polity (chapter 5). However, the everyday practices of nonelite actors, the majority of Korean society, determined the degree to which overlapping modalities of assimilation—spiritual, material, and civic— could penetrate the fabric of Keijo - and thus the consciousness of its residents. As a result, these contested experiments of colonial governmentality , especially those implemented before 1937, remained highly epilogue After Empire’s Demise The Postcolonial Remaking of Seoul’s Public Spaces Epilogue | 205 piecemeal and makeshift in their subjectivizing effects. That poorer Koreans and other marginalized individuals refused to invest financial or emotional resources in the highly discriminatory rationality of the Government-General also reveals the limited reach of Japanese rule. Both the structure and agency of colonial society thus produced considerable discrepancies between the arterial ostentation of the city’s modern infrastructure and the capillary frailty of its wretched alleyways. Although wartime mobilization necessitated a more thorough program of imperial subjectification to overcome these fissures, the biopolitical rationality of the late colonial regime could not but inherit the disabling fractures of the previous era. When read both along and against the archival grain, the frenetic enumeration of inadequately trained Korean bodies called upon to make overcompensated demonstrations of loyalty for the empire stand out as dramatic reminders of this long-standing and largely insurmountable problem of rule. Much as the Government-General sought to displace the spatiality of the precolonial city of Hanyang/Hwangsŏng after 1910, Korea’s new leaders ventured to remake Seoul into a proud symbol of an autonomous nation-state, albeit one that quickly divided into two rival regimes as a result of the Cold War. In contrast to the thirty-five-year history of Keijo explored thus far, the city’s postcolonial reconstruction commenced immediately after liberation with the virtual erasure of Namsan’s Shinto shrines , the most palpable and foreign symbol of wartime mobilization. However, the project to decolonize the city’s public spaces, although certainly not carried out continuously or with the same intensity after 1945, will continue until at least until 2030, when the current phase of restorations on Kyŏngbok Palace, the site of the former GovernmentGeneral building (demolished in 1995), are complete. Considered together as temporal bookends of a nearly century-long project, these two sites demonstrate that the intangible legacies of Keijo -’s spaces have remained very much alive in the changing landscape of contemporary Seoul, even though the physical manifestations of Japanese rule have been largely removed. Moreover, official projects to replace these monuments with ones befitting a liberated (but still divided) 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.1 The immediate destruction of Namsan’s Shinto - shrines resulted from the unlikely convergence of Koreans who sought to raze the powerful symbols of forced emperor worship and Japanese officials who hoped to 206 | Epilogue protect the dignity of these besieged sites. As was true throughout postliberation Korea, anti-Japanese activities in Seoul broke out quickly following the end of the war, as agitated organizers posted handbills encouraging residents to “Burn Korea Shrine and Seoul Shrine!”2 Given such threats, Shinto - priests met with Japanese officials the day after liberation (August 16) and decided to remove Japan’s...