Colonial history in Korea is fraught with anecdotes evidencing Japan's darker motives. It is widely believed that, upon deliberating the invasion of Korea for centuries, Japanese attempted cultural genocide against Koreans by enslaving the people, desecrating their heritage, and enforcing assimilation. While much of it is true, there is more to colonialism than an odious intention. In Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945, Taylor Atkins argues that Japanese love of things Korean or Koreaphilia also helped to facilitate colonial domination. This book examines the aspect of liberal colonialism, wherein Japanese looked upon Korean culture as the object of fetish than that of contempt. In light of contemporary Japanese enthusiasm for the Korean Wave (hallyu), Akins's study is an intriguing looking glass into the colonial origins of Koreaphilia.

According to Primitive Selves, Koreaphilia is a variant of Orientalism and Japanese attraction to Korea parallels European fascination with the Orient. While Atkins's use of primary sources is innovative, his work has a schematic resemblance to Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and reinforces Michel Foucault's idea of knowledge as power. A comparable work in Japanese Studies is Stefan Tanaka's Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), which examines turn-of-the-century Japanese attitude towards China. Atkins, on the other hand, makes a direct contribution to Korean Studies. Like Said, Atkins is concerned with the ways in which colonial officials, travelers, photographers, ethnomusicologists, and social scientists cultivated the “technology of imperialism.” Primitive Selves traces their activities in chapters on colonial ethnography, curatorial culture, and popular culture. Atkins argues that, not only was their knowledge of Korea instrumental to colonial management, but also “transformed both the observer and the observed” (p. 3). However, his discussion of the transformation is one-sided, perhaps due to his reliance on Japanese language materials. We end up learning more about the complexity of Japanese colonial gaze than Korean responses to that gaze.

So, what was the gaze like? Japanese saw Koreans through the lens of cultural evolutionism. Koreans were thought of as primitive people, who not only predated Japanese, but also remained as the bearer of all things past. Japanese scholars were enamored with the idea of Korean difference and documented what they perceived as Korean essence. In his reading of colonial ethnography, Akins characterizes Japanese view of Koreans as “pretentious exoticism” (p. 58) intended to reaffirm Japanese modernity, while accentuating Korean backwardness. Primitive Selves illustrates the ways in which Japanese scholars attempted to “preserve” the Korean past by unearthing prehistoric sites, archiving vernacular Korean, recording folk songs and shamanistic rituals, and photographing everyday life. Atkins observes that, despite their sincerity, colonial inquirers had a peculiar angle to their gaze. They often searched for the signs of Korean regress, discounting the fact that Korea—like Japan—was in the midst of unprecedented modernization.

Atkins's interpretation of Japanese scholarship on Korea sheds light on the legacy of colonial historiography, which remains a contentious issue even to this day. From archeology to history, a good deal of modern Korean studies was produced during the colonial era, written from colonizer's perspective, and continued to shape postcolonial worldview. Japanese scholars portrayed the native culture in such a way that it made colonial rule seem inevitable. Besides emphasizing the incompetence of native leadership, history before colonialism was cast with a sense of fatalism, leading to eventual decline of Korean civilization. The fatalism was also reflected in Japanese caricature of Korean “national character,” summed up as the “primordial simplicity, relentless melancholy, and mordacious wit” (p. 167). In this vein, Atkins's discussion of the folk song Arirang is a telling example. Despite the multiplicity of its form and content, Japanese interpretation of Arirang was singularly focused on the melancholic aspect, which they saw as a quintessential Korean character. Interestingly, such a defeatist take on Korean culture persisted in Korea even after colonialism.

Primitive Selves provides a valuable insight into the culture of Japanese colonialism and, as the author intended, the book might well become an excellent pedagogical resource. Atkins is particularly good at analyzing non-traditional historical materials, such as photography and music. Besides introducing a collection of rare ethnographic images, his discussion of Korean folk music and modern dancers like Ch'oe Sŭng-hŭi is captivating. The fact that some Japanese favored Korean culture in the 1920s and 1930s is also intriguing. Atkins's focus on Japanese Koreaphilia, however, raises a question on the viability of liberal colonialism in the midst of draconian imperial policies. While Atkins professes not to be an apologist for imperialism, he comes across as rather ambivalent when he says, “At its best, history is a moral science—not a guide to future action, nor a smug denunciation of people too dead to defend themselves, but rather a cautionary tale of remonstrance” (p. 50). Can history become a cautionary tale of remonstrance without a rigorous critique of its dark side?