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

The study of urban modernity in colonial-era Korea has expanded within both Japanese and South Korean historiography in recent decades. Since an unofficial taboo on discussions of colonial modernity was lifted in the 1980s, a number of highly informative monographs on the colonial pasts of Seoul, Pusan, and other modern Korean cities have appeared in South Korea. Particularly noteworthy are the works of Son Chŏngmok, a former Seoul city planner with colonial-era experience, and of Kim Paegyŏng, a younger historian. While Son’s books are especially rich in facts and statistics, Kim’s are valuable because of the author’s skillful use of postcolonial and postnationalist approaches.¹ One reason for the growth in the study of colonial-era cities in South Korea today has been the heated debates, in both academic and nonacademic forums, on how best to understand Japanese colonialism during the period 1910 to 1945 and colonial-era Korean collaboration with the colonizers. Research on colonial-era urbanization supplies evidence to those arguing from each of two different perspectives: first, those who take a more positive view of colonial-period policies and development (and are intent on emphasizing the continuity between colonial and postcolonial urban planning) and, second, those who cling to a more traditional, skeptical view foregrounding the poverty, ethnic discrimination, and exploitation seen in the colonial city space. Despite the interest in research on Korea’s colonial period among Western scholars, Assimilating Seoul is, to my knowledge, the first monograph-length study in English dealing specifically with Korea’s urban development during that period.² As a pioneering work on an important subject so far glaringly under-researched outside of South Korea and Japan, it enriches the scholarship on Korean history in English.

As mentioned above, colonialism is a controversial subject in South Korea and elsewhere. Seen from this perspective, Henry’s book deserves praise for its skillful balancing between two different views of the colonial past. There are those who have understood Japanese colonial modernization as a successful project that was able to win the loyalty of at least some middle-class Koreans owing to the universality of its underlying modernist vision, while others have taken a more traditional position emphasizing colonialist oppression, covert and overt nationalist resistance, the ethnocentric brutality of wartime attempts to “imperialize” Koreans for use as cannon fodder on the Japanese empire’s battlefields, and the utter failure of such efforts to change Koreans’ ethnic consciousness. But as Henry persuasively demonstrates to the reader, the truth, as often happens, is somewhere in the middle—albeit significantly closer to the latter position. On the one hand, both the colonial authorities and the local nationalist elites embraced the values of hygienic modernity—the apparatus of modern “biopower,” ranging from sewage collection to mass vaccination, that was designed to fight off the germs and keep modern bodies safe, sound, and useful for the sake of capital accumulation. Korean nationalist newspapers, otherwise fiercely critical of the colonial authorities’ policies, thus actively promoted government-led exhibitions and films on sanitation and hygiene, partially because outbreaks of contagious diseases continued to ravage the colonial capital throughout the 1920s. On the other hand, even the relatively moderate bourgeois nationalists saw poverty, rather than Koreans’ “lack of civilization,” as the root cause of the persistently unsanitary conditions prevalent in colonial cities and, furthermore, had little doubt that colonial ethnic discrimination was the main factor perpetuating poverty and essentially premodern conditions on the Korean side of the ethnic divide in the colonial urban centers.

While some Japanese-educated middle-class Koreans did seemingly acquiesce to the colonialist assimilation project, their feelings remained ambivalent. Chŏn Sŏng’uk (1877–1945), for example, was a councilman in the Korean colonial capital of Kyŏngsŏng (today’s Seoul) and a supporter of the local Shinto shrine...