In this bold and ambitious book, Todd Henry directly tackles the question of assimilation in colonial Korea under Japanese rule. Assimilation is a topic as old as the field of Japanese colonial studies, but Assimilating Seoul adopts a distinctly spatial approach that makes it a unique contribution in the English language. Focusing on colonial Keijō (present-day Seoul), Henry examines the Japanese efforts to assimilate Korea and its inhabitants as a series of “spatial interventions” (p. 29) in local life and geography. In leading these efforts, he argues, not only did the Government-General and its local “proxies” (p. 2) exploit the transformative power of the spectacle, a key word in his analysis, but also, wielding a shifting mix of “sovereign power” and “governmentality” (p. 8), they aimed to turn Koreans into “self-regulating” subjects (p. 4)—a Foucauldian argument that is strikingly reminiscent of Takashi Fujitani's analysis of the emperor system in Meiji Japan.
The book begins by tracing the “respatialization” (p. 29) of the Korean royal city of Hanyang into the colonial showcase capital of Keijō. Drawing on the rich body of Korean-language research, Henry documents how colonial planners converted the Kyŏngbok Palace grounds into the new seat of the Government-General, and built other spectacular symbols of Japanese authority. Due to financial constraints and local resistance, however, urban reforms barely extended beyond major thoroughfares and Japanese settlements, leaving Korean neighborhoods of the “northern village” (p. 60) largely untouched. The result, he argues, was a “highly uneven” development of the city, which succeeded in transforming the arteries but largely failed “at the level of the city's capillaries” (pp. 22, 60).
This point becomes a running theme for the rest of the book, which is organized around three key projects of assimilation Henry calls “spiritual,” “material,” and “civic” (p. 3). Efforts to cultivate loyalty toward the Japanese imperial house are framed in terms of “spiritual assimilation,” which revolved around the Shintō shrine complex built atop Namsan. Seoul Shrine's annual festivals organized by settlers, Henry argues, became a primary means of capturing the Korean “spiritual affinities” (p. 77), as the shrine processions gradually included more Korean participants and extended into their streets. Particularly fascinating is the discussion of a competition for visitors between Seoul Shrine founded by settlers and Korea Shrine built by the Government-General, which gave further impetus to this project. Ultimately, however, Henry finds little evidence of success in assimilating the Korean masses who remained “uncommitted” visitors and “passive” onlookers (pp. 64, 73).
So, too, did the majority of Koreans remain distant participants in what Henry calls “material assimilation.” Specifically, he examines two industrial expositions held in 1915 and 1929 on the desacralized grounds of Kyŏngbok Palace. They were designed not only to display modern achievements of Japanese rule, but also to persuade their Korean visitors “to embrace industry as their own personal ethic” (p. 92). As with the case of shrine visits, Henry observes that Korean attendance was partly coerced, and many visitors also treated each exposition as an opportunity for recreation rather than education, thereby frustrating the official design.
By contrast, sanitation campaigns—the driving force of “civic assimilation”—had some success in penetrating the everyday life of nonelite residents. Shifting the focus down to the level of neighborhoods, Henry vividly recounts the efforts, led by the police and local elites, to combat Keijō's reputation as the empire's “diseased city” (p. 131) through seasonal cleanups, hygiene lectures, and biomedical inspection. He also traces a vigorous campaign launched in competition by the Korean nationalists to link the health of individual Koreans to a larger national body. Although these measures met some resistance of the “underclass,” one may find here the clearest illustration of Henry's claim that the colonial authority deployed “an increasingly sophisticated formula of coercive and persuasive measures” to make Koreans “self-regulating individuals” (pp. 137–38).
Henry ends the discussion by showing how the three projects of assimilation culminated in the wartime policy of “imperial subjectification” (p. 169) after 1937. On the one hand, the colonial state continued to use spectacular events (such as the commemorations of “the 2600th anniversary” of the Japanese nation) to unify Korea and Japan under “the empire's sacred topography” (p. 170). On the other hand, a militarized form of spiritual assimilation began to thrust its way into individual Korean homes with the installation of household shrine altars and Ise amulets. But Henry argues, as Shintō priests themselves acknowledged at the time, that the statistical results of these efforts (treated by officials as an index of popular reverence) betrayed the persistent reality of local resistance to assimilation.
To the end, Henry concludes, the colonial authority never fully succeeded in its efforts to assimilate Koreans, which “remained highly piecemeal and makeshift in their subjectivizing effects” (pp. 204–5). Indeed, the colonial state as portrayed in his analysis is much weaker than often assumed, compelling us to see its limits and struggles. By focusing on the key public spaces of Keijō, moreover, Henry significantly expands our understanding of assimilation beyond the institutional history of schools and factories. His emphasis on the year 1925 as a turning point (when the new Government-General building and Korea Shrine were completed) is also welcome, though his narrative in no way diminishes the political significance of the 1919 March First movement.
The temporary and limited nature of Henry's assimilation projects, however, does make one wonder how seriously, and to what extent, the colonial state relied on once-a-year shrine processions or a few expositions to assimilate the Korean masses. A more convincing explanation might have placed these fleeting spectacles in the context of long-term programs to develop the Korean economy and educational system (for which a deeper engagement with Mark Caprio's recent workFootnote 5 would have been helpful). On the other hand, the “political rationality” of the state, intent on making Koreans “self-governing” subjects (p. 8), appears uniform across time and space. I found myself wondering if the Government-General had such a clear and ambitious goal from the outset, and wanting some discussion of policy debates that might have attended its evolution.
Throughout the book, Henry makes an admirable effort to locate nonelite voices. But when he does, he is often too quick to read every Korean response as a political gesture of subversion—from pursuing recreational opportunities at the exposition to pickpocketing (!) during the shrine procession. Heavy reliance on media sources (especially the semiofficial paper Keijō Nippō) also limits his strategy of “reading both along and against the archival grain” (p. 13), which does not quite amount to the ethnography the book promises to offer. (Diaries, memoirs, and oral histories surely exist.)
Nevertheless, these challenges of working on the colonial archive are by no means limited to Henry's book, which I regard overall as a timely and provocative study. It opens up new horizons for research in a field that is vibrant and still growing.
