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

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

62 Like the development of Keijo -’s public infrastructure examined in chapter 1, specific city sites, interconnected parts of the larger urban fabric, played important roles in the contested process of colonial subject formation . This chapter focuses on the spiritual dimensions of that project by examining Namsan, home to the city’s Shinto - complex. This complex included Seoul Shrine, a community institution founded by Japanese settlers in 1898, and Korea Shrine, a mammoth monument erected by the Government-General in 1925.1 Even before the Asia-Pacific War (1937–45) mandated that all subjects (both Japanese and especially Koreans) identify with the imperial house, Namsan was at the center of an idealized project of emperor-led assimilation, one that used Shinto rituals to cultivate reverence for an ever-expanding multinational community. One of the main factors complicating this project of spiritual assimilation , which even the colonial state embraced only halfheartedly before 1925, was the fraught relationship between its obligation of imperial allegiance and an already circumscribed commitment to religious freedom . According to the Government-General, shrine rituals constituted a civic duty of all imperial subjects regardless of their personal faith. Extended from the metropole, this ideology, notably opposed by several Korean Protestants during the 1920s and 1930s, was also regularly undercut by the religious nature of Seoul Shrine, the only public institution capable of exposing Koreans to unfamiliar imperial rituals before chapter 2 Spiritual Assimilation Namsan’s Shinto - Shrines and Their Festival Celebrations Spiritual Assimilation | 63 the establishment of Korea Shrine.2 Moreover, as Yamaguchi Ko -ichi has shown, only in 1925 did the Government-General separate shrine Shinto -, those state-administered institutions and practices associated with civic rituals, from sect Shinto - and other officially sanctioned religions , such as Buddhism and Christianity, all of which were seen as useful, if potentially disruptive, forces of social mobilization.3 During the late 1920s and early 1930s, some priests protested against the nonreligious status in which the Government-General had placed shrine Shinto -, urging teachers to mobilize school children to participate in overtly religious rituals, such as purification ceremonies.4 In part due to the colonial state’s failure to draw more than a porous and contested boundary between civic rites and religious practices, shrine Shinto - had a far less unified and monolithic effect on the city’s inhabitants than most accounts have suggested. Spiritual assimilation was, in fact, poorly operationalized, and it was done in highly makeshift ways prior to the government’s unveiling of Korea Shrine in 1925. That year, an important threshold in the city’s spatial transformation, charted in the previous chapter, proved to be an equally significant turning point in the history of colonial Shinto - insofar as it established the necessary infrastructure for emperor worship. Although discussions ensured thereafter that Seoul Shrine might be granted an official ranking in an empire-wide hierarchy of Shinto - institutions , the Government-General did not successfully yoke this local institution until the promulgation of new shrine regulations in 1936.5 Before then, its exceptional status outside of metropolitan conventions allowed the Japanese leaders of Seoul Shrine the room they needed to defend against the colonial state’s interference into the daily management of shrine Shinto -, one of the few aspects of self-rule that settlers continued to administer after the annexation.6 Having closely guarded their expatriate shrine and its cultural activities as a bastion of colonial privilege, ethnocentric parish leaders only reluctantly followed state orders to “assimilate” Koreans into their ethnic community before 1925 and continued to do so only in highly subordinated ways. In addition to already popular kisaeng entertainment and ancient court music, indigenous deities and Korean costumes were finally incorporated into Seoul Shrine and its grand festival in 1929. Two years later in 1931, colonized parish leaders took charge of leading the annual procession for the first time, a task they carefully negotiated in order to satisfy their more powerful Japanese counterparts and to distinguish themselves from less fortunate Koreans. To be sure, such inclusionary concessions 64 | Spiritual Assimilation certainly aimed to elicit greater support from colonized spectators. However, these increasingly aggressive measures of spiritual assimilation also targeted the colonial state, which had seriously undermined settler control over colonial Shinto - by placing the much larger Korea Shrine higher atop Namsan and by linking this mammoth complex to Seoul Shrine through a back approach that led from the former to the latter. Although competition between the Government...