In Primitive Selves, E. Taylor Atkins advances three central arguments: First, he “challenges the prevailing historiographical characterization of imperial Japanese attitudes toward Koreans and their culture,” which, with few exceptions, “insist that Japanese were contemptuous of Koreana and determined to obliterate any evidence or memory of an independent national culture and identity through aggressive assimilation directives” (pp. 2–3). The evidence he has presented “suggests that there was indeed space for assertions of Koreanness within Japan's imperial culture, and that Koreana held considerable appeal for some [Japanese] government officials, scholars, hobbyists, and consumers in Japan's emerging mass media culture” (3). Second, he explains that this appeal of Koreana for the Japanese was in part due to the fact that “Korea gave Japanese an opportunity to meditate intensively on their own historical and modern identity” (3). Third, he argues that “the acts of gazing and being gazed at fundamentally transformed both the observer and the observed” (3). In connection with these three central arguments, Atkins asserts that the Japanese sustained interest in “documenting native [Korean] customs, photographing Korean people, collecting artifacts, and locating and preserving historic sites was motivated as much by a desire to discover Japanese origins as to manage the colonial population” (57). Accordingly, he concludes that the “Japanese thus envisioned Koreans as their ‘primitive’ selves” (57).

Atkins has written a fascinating account of how Japanese colonial administrations did indeed attempt to systematically study, analyze, and preserve aspects of Korea's cultural heritage, and that this was a consistent feature of Japanese colonial rule despite Japan's “aggressive assimilation efforts designed to remold Koreans into Japanese imperial subjects” (10). He also convincingly shows that many Japanese had a fascination with features of Korean culture—especially through the popularity of Korean music, performing artists such as Ch'oe Sŭng-hŭi, and the “erotically intoxicating” courtesan-entertainers called kisaeng.

However, I find less convincing the over-arching conceptual theme of this book that Japanese interest in traditional Koreana was motivated by a desire to discover Japanese origins. He takes it as an accepted truism that the Japanese and Koreans did indeed have a common origin. For instance, he states: “One key component of imperial ideology set Korea apart within the pan-Asian empire Japan was struggling to forge: the scientific consensus that Japanese and Koreans emerged from a common racial stock” (56). Again, he notes that the “consumption of Koreana was motivated largely by the pleasure of the exotic—an exotic that was still strangely familiar, given the ideology of common racial ancestry—but also contributed to the ongoing self-criticism of modernity in which Japanese intellectuals tirelessly engaged” (185). Still more, he stated this as “the core theme of this book: a nostalgic longing for a purer self that has been lost, yet can be retrieved through the consumption of Koreana” (148).

Atkins presents no solid evidence for this interpretation; instead, he seems to have projected it into the motivations of the Japanese who conducted ethnological research on Koreana such as Tsuboi Shōgorō, Imamura Tomo, Murayama Chijin, and Akiba Takashi, and even onto the Japanese public at large. Also, I cannot imagine why Japanese would have any serious incentive to look to the Korean peninsula to discover their “primitive selves” while the entire Japanese nation was reeling from the revival of a radical, militant, mass-based revolutionary religion of völkisch nationalism—radical Shintō ultranationalism—that served as a massive cultural counter-narrative to Western modernity. This religion had at its core the biblical birth of the universe by the deities Kami mi musubi no kami and Taka mi musubi no kami, the creation of the Japanese islands by the deities Izanami and Izanagi, the divine origins of the imperial line from Amaterasu omikami, the ethnic divinity and superiority of the Japanese people, and the divine mission for the Japanese imperial state to establish a new world order. That is to say, the revival of “pure” Shintō, which began in the Tokugawa period, was an attempt by Japanese to rediscover their primitive selves in what they had imagined existed in a utopian primitive society, first before the corrupting influences of Confucianism and Buddhism from the Eurasian continent, and then most recently from the cultural impact of Western secular civilization. Atkins has turned this on its head.

Nevertheless, I think Primitive Selves is an important work. It is a fine, detailed study of Japanese-Korean relations from a unique, cultural perspective that historians usually do not consider, and it will no doubt spark continued discussion and research on this topic. Accordingly, it is a must read for students of Japanese and Korean history as well as comparative colonial history.