Organizer: Michael Kim, Yonsei University

Chair: Carter J. Eckert, Harvard University

Discussant: Koen De Ceuster, Leiden University

The city is an important site for examining twentieth-century Korean history, and an investigation of colonial urban life can unearth a wealth of issues concerning the modern and the colonial. The everyday life of the city, the reception of popular culture, and the redefinition of urban space and identities of both the Korean colonial subjects and the Japanese colonizers are all areas that requires further inquiry. The arrival of a mass consumer society, even if it was extremely limited in scale, encouraged fantasies of commodity consumption, while the advent of new technologies like automobiles, movie projectors, and gramophones gave birth to bustling and boisterous urban spectacles that captivated and enthralled city residents. Exploring the impact of the modern city experience on the everyday lives of colonial urban residents is the primary concern of this panel.

The advent of modern life in the colonial city, of course, is not to assume that there was an uncritical acceptance of all things modern in colonial Korea. Nor did the formation of the modern city signify the complete disappearance of pre-colonial urban spaces, identities and cultural practices among both the colonizers as well as the colonized. What took place, instead, was the reshaping of existing spaces and identities along with the introduction of new cultural and social patterns to the colonial city. Ultimately, the fact that this modern transformation of urban life took place under colonial domination presents a number of significant historical issues for the papers of this panel to explore.

Baek Moon Im, Yonsei University

This paper examines the formation of Korean cinema spectatorship during the colonial period. When the cinema was first imported from the West, it had to compete for colonial audiences with more traditional popular culture commodities. The cinema began to gain in popularity around 1926, yet the manner in which colonial audiences enjoyed this new medium became mixed with their accustomed ways of participating in pre-existing forms of popular culture. This was because the major audiences for popular culture were still living in the countryside, where vagabond theatrical troupes had greater appeal, and the cinema remained mainly a part of the city culture. Another important aspect of cinema during this period was that almost of all the films were produced by Japanese companies for the colonized Korean audiences, which affected the reception of this new cultural commodity. In this regard, the colonial cinema was an experimental site where the experience of modernity and colonization became represented. In particular, action movies and propaganda movies became the main genres where the organization of the visual field was conducted. This study focuses on the cinematic pleasure provided by the Japanese empire and its reception both in the metropolis as well as the countryside of colonized Korea. An examination of how urban and rural audiences interpreted this new medium can show how the emerging cinema culture responded to modernity and colonization.

Christine Kim, Georgetown University

During the 35 years of Japan’s colonial administration of Korea, the character of its capital Seoul was transformed from one of "mediaeval flavor" to a center of urban modernity. As the most prominent and politically significant edifices of the city, the five royal palaces played a critical role in this process. This paper will examine how the Japanese use of each palace represented Enlightenment notions of civilization that separated the Empire from its colonial subjects, and how this process enabled a fundamental reconceptualization of Seoul/Keijo among large number of Koreans and Japanese visitors to the capital.

As an imperial project writ large, the repackaging of the former Chosôn palace grounds into public spaces resembled the process of dislocation that accompanied the Tokugawa-Meiji transition in Japan, and similarly yielded modern cultural institutions such as a zoo, botanical garden, museum, and exhibition space. Conceived as efforts to erase the city’s royal patrimony, the new public spaces opened the way for Koreans to experience the dynasty’s monuments as cultural artifacts of the past rather than those of the nation. Enormously popular recreational sites, they served both as agents of desacralizing the former royal residences and as novel venues of spectacle, commerce and entertainment. The Empire’s effort to introduce the image of a "new Korea" through the palace’s attractions resulted in the creation of a tourism boom that brought an unprecedented number of Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese to the city.

Shino Toyoshima, SOAS, University of London

One aspect of the 19^th century Japanese emigration was the introduction of colonial knowledge and imperial culture in the overseas territories. At the same time Japanese settlers from different parts of the homeland brought with them particular regional identities which they initially sought to maintain. These identities eventually conflicted with the need to build a new community. The Japanese national identity of the settlers became problematic, and their simultaneously unproblematic identity as coloniser was problematised. Over time a new local identity developed upon the colonial encounter, also resulting in the production of new cultures.

This paper explores the narratives and the symbolic representations of the Japanese settler community in Kunsan during the transformation of this treaty port into a modern colonial city. A common identity developed in a modern urban space identified by western style public buildings, Japanese style residences and exoticised representations of Korea. Through their various narratives using rhetoric devices of inclusion and exclusion of Korean subjects, this paper seeks to present a self image of Japanese settlers outside the colonial capital as The Urban Experience and the Construction of Colonial Subjectivity

Michael Kim, Yonsei University, Korea

Colonial Seoul, which was once the seat of power of the Choson monarchs, gradually became reconfigured into a showcase for the Japanese Empire. The colonial authorities constructed grandiose buildings to celebrate their dominance, while the arrival of capital and technology to the peninsula and the emergence of modern railway stations, department stores, and popular theaters, etc. transformed the capital city into a center of cultural production and commodity consumption. Certain aspects of everyday life in Seoul began to assume the cultural patterns of modern life found elsewhere, but the colonial domination of Korea also imprinted in the minds of colonial subjects persistent reminders of their subjugated fate. Thus, the residents of colonial Seoul navigated an urban terrain that was shaped by both the forces of capitalism and imperialism.

This paper will attempt to examine the reception of the city and explore the ways in which the residents of Seoul experienced a modern urban culture and understood their everyday lives within a colonial city. A glimpse of the impact that colonial Seoul had on some of its residents may be gained through an examination of colonial publications and the montage of visual images that remain from the period. Ultimately, a careful consideration of the colonial urban experience may prove a better understanding of how colonial subjects adapted, resisted and even compromised with the realities of their everyday lives under the colonial system.