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Assimilating Seoul
Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Coloial Korean 1910â"1945
By Todd A. Henry UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95841-8
CHAPTER 1
Constructing Keijo
The Uneven Spaces of a Colonial Capital
This chapter traces the Government-General's attempts to transform the symbolic and material landscape of Hanyang, royal city of the Choson dynasty, into the colonial capital of Keijo (Kyongsong). Through an initial period of urban reforms and a later phase of city planning, the colonial state remade the skeletal and aesthetic frames of Keijo even as it neglected considerable parts of the city, especially in the Korean-populated northern village. To borrow a metaphor used by Gyan Prakash in his study of colonial India, the smooth and sanitary circulation envisioned by officials only reached the city's main arteries, rather than penetrating to the capillary level of everyday life. The result was a multilayered built environment, characterized by unlikely juxtapositions of old and new, neglect and excess, and chaos and order. Like other modern cities in the metropole to which planners frequently compared it, Keijo developed in highly uneven ways, a phenomenon further exacerbated by ethnic, class, and other divisions produced through Japanese rule. By its very definition, then, "constructing Keijo" remained a contentious project, one that led concerned officials to invest tremendous financial and ideological resources in transforming this historic capital into the peninsula's showcase city. Although certainly less grandiose in their designs, a diverse group of residents also made assertive claims on the city's spaces, where those who were well placed could seize enriching possibilities, but where many more of the less fortunate residents remained vulnerable to its disrepairs.
FROM ROYAL HANYANG TO IMPERIAL HWANGSONG, 1394–1910
When Japanese officials annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910, they inherited a city with more than five hundred years of history. Shortly after establishing the Choson dynasty in 1392, the first king, Yi Songgye (T'aejo), constructed a new royal city at Hanyang to distance himself from Kaegyong (present-day Kaesong), the main center of power during the Koryo dynasty (935–1392). Chosen for its geomantic propitiousness, Hanyang developed according to an adaptation of Chinese planning principles, incorporating elements that would legitimate and protect the new dynasty. As figure 1 illustrates, the city followed many continental precedents. For example, Choson planners placed the royal family's ancestral shrine (Chongmyo) to the east of the king's main palace (Kyongbokgung) and an altar to the state deities (Sajikdan) to the west. Following the Confucian belief in the five elements and their virtues as described in the Book of Changes, the city's five central points, the (1) East, (2) West, (3) South, and (4) North Gates and (5) the Belfry — which corresponded to (1) wood for benevolence, (2) gold for righteousness, (3) fire for propriety, (4) water for wisdom, and (5) earth for trust — were laid out around Kyongbok Palace. The main northsouth axis (Chujak Taero) emanated from the palace, while the city's other main arteries included Chongno, which extended from the West Gate (Sodaemun) to the East Gate (Tongdaemun), and another road extending from the Belfry (Posingak) to the South Gate (Namdaemun). Officials had also ensured that the city met the geomantic prescription that it be surrounded by four auspicious mountains, through which the proper amount of energy (ki) could pass. From these nearby mountains flowed a major source of the city's water supply, the Ch'onggye Stream. Although departing from Chinese cities with square or rectangular enclosures, Choson officials constructed an oval wall to defend an urban basin naturally surrounded by four major mountain ranges.
During the mid- to late Choson period, the capital city experienced significant changes. In particular, while continuing to function as a political center, Hanyang also grew into a commercial hub. According to Ko Tong-hwan, both the national circulation of metallic currency and the implementation of the Uniform Land Tax Law during the latter half of the seventeenth century spurred the development of an urban economy based on commercial currency. Poor harvests and epidemics during this period drew desperate peasants to the expanding suburban areas just outside the city's walls. These developments led to a metropolitan population that grew from just over eighty thousand in 1657 to nearly two hundred thousand in 1669, a level it retained until the end of the Choson dynasty. Within the city's walls, the commoner markets of Ihyon and Ch'ilp'ae came to complement the Six Licensed Stores (Yuguijon), a commercial area located along Chongno that provided goods for the royal palaces. As a result, the majority of Hanyang's population was engaged in some form of commercial enterprise by the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, new, nonelite forms of culture and entertainment developed around the middle classes of the so-called chung'in, bureaucratic specialists in foreign languages, law, and medicine.
With the onset of imperialist aggression during the late nineteenth century, protecting the economic and political autonomy of the dynasty became a growing concern for Choson's leaders, some of whom sought to refashion the royal city of Hanyang into the imperial capital of Hwangsong. After the Sino-Japanese rivalry over the peninsula (1894–95), the assassination of Queen Min by the Japanese military (1895), and King Kojong's flight to the Russian Legation (1896), concerned officials of the newly established Great Han Empire — a novel political, economic, and cultural system aimed at promoting national independence by reasserting the power of the throne — launched the Kwangmu Reforms (1897–1904) under the slogan of "old foundation, new participation" (kubon sinch'am). An effort to use Western technology to buttress monarchical authority and develop a modern infrastructure, these reforms aimed to make the city capable of representing and defending the fledgling Korean nation-state at a dangerous time of imperialist intrusions. According to Yi T'ae-jin, the campaign included several important changes, including (1) the destruction of temporary commercial stalls jutting from the city's two main commercial thoroughfares, thus restoring these boulevards to their original width and facilitating smoother conveyance; (2) the creation of roads centered on Emperor Kojong's new court/residence at Kyong'un (later Toksu) Palace, thereby establishing a radial system of streets linking the new imperial capital to its suburbs; and (3) the erection of buildings and other structures asserting national autonomy under the Korean monarch, such as the Independence Gate, Pagoda Park (built on Won'gak Temple grounds in Chongno where Choson kings accepted petitions from their subjects), and a memorial monument commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Kojong's coronation in 1863 (also a popular site of gatherings). (See figure 2.)
Most Korean historians have understood these changes as part of a program of "internal development" (naejaejok paljon) and gradual modernization. Yi T'ae-jin, for example, has argued that the Kwangmu Reforms, advanced in large part by Korean diplomats with experience living in Washington, DC, likely adopted the American capital as a conceptual model, an exemplary embodiment of the empire's commitment to "old foundation, new participation." In truth, the leaders of the Great Han Empire were engaged in a globalized process of nationstate building, the native and nonnative elements of which cannot be easily disaggregated because of the city's (and the nation's) position in an overlapping network of semicolonial structures. On the one hand, some elites sought to establish greater political autonomy by downplaying China's historical influence and thereby promoting Korea's cultural primacy. The symbolic valence of this project was concretely manifested in the construction of the Western-style Independence Gate, overwriting the ritual site where Qing envoys had been regularly received by the Choson court (Yong'un Gate). However, as Andre Schmid has shown, other purifying tactics of official nationalism ironically relied on the hoary symbols of the Middle Kingdom, undercutting efforts to displace the Sino-centric world of Choson's recent past. Such difficulties took concrete shape in the Ring Hall Altar (Hwan'gudan or Won'gudan), a new national structure built for Kojong's elevation in 1897 from king to emperor on the very site of Qing envoys' former residence (Nambyol Palace), but which uncannily resembled Beijing's Altar of Heaven.
On the other hand, these projects to create an imperial capital that exuded self-confidence in official nationalism vis-à-vis a declining China were carried out with and against imperial powers after the Sino-Japanese War, particularly Russia and Japan, but also the United States. Indeed, the very spaces of Hwangsong came to reflect the precarious geopolitical position in which the Great Han Empire found itself during this period. It was not by coincidence, then, that the center of the new imperial capital, Kyong'un Palace, was constructed in close proximity to the city's foreign legations. In his pioneering work on the Great Han Empire's urban planning projects, Kim Kwang-u uncovered that a secret passageway and bridge were built to link the Russian Legation (where Kojong briefly resided after the Sino-Japanese War) to the new imperial palace complex. Other modernizing projects were similarly tied to the semicolonial politics of concessions during this period. For example, the Great Han Empire employed two American entrepreneurs, Henry Collbran and H. R. Bostwick, to introduce new technology and to finance the construction of a streetcar system, power lines, street lamps, water pipes, and telephone lines. Among the streetcar lines, one was laid symbolically from Kyong'un Palace, across the main thoroughfare of Chongno, to Hongniing, the site of Queen Min's tomb on the city's eastern fringe. Meanwhile, these monarch-centered projects led to a series of popular riots among local Korean residents, who viewed this foreign technology, managed by American engineers and operated by Japanese conductors, as both a geomantic intrusion onto their communal living space and a public threat to property-holding patterns.
As these riots suggest, Hwangsong's perilous position within the transnational politics of East Asian imperialism necessitated internal political changes that were also reflected in city spaces. In spite of Confucian rhetoric calling for a popularly oriented nation, the kind of Korean people envisioned by the elite architects of the Great Han Empire was closer to dutiful subjects rather than citizens endowed with individual rights. Therefore, where once virtually the entire city consisted of royal spaces, government officials now created stronger connections between the symbolic center of the monarchy and groups of socially stratified Koreans. The new streetcar line linking the imperial palace complex with the commercial district along Chongno was one particularly symbolic manifestation of this important transformation. Indeed, the new imperial city witnessed a noticeable increase in the number of contact zones between the sovereign and his subjects, including the area in front of the Taehan Gate (the entrance to Kyong'un Palace), where Hwangsong's residents gathered for new national events, such as Kojong's elevation in 1897 from king to emperor. That these changes reflected new strictures on personal freedoms is supported by the fate of the short-lived Independence Club (1896–98), a group closely associated with the urban reforms of this period. In fact, when some members pushed for a more participatory constitutional system, the Korean court quickly disbanded the club and centralized state authority under the newly elevated emperor, Kojong.
With Japan's victory against Russia in 1905 and the subsequent establishment of a semicolonial protectorate government, the monarch-centered project to transform Hwangsong into a national center became nearly impossible, especially after Kojong's forced abdication in 1907. When Japan annexed the peninsula in 1910, early colonial officials hijacked these reforms and began to institute their own improvements, remaking the city's spaces into a showcase of Japanese modernity. However, the modern project of physically and symbolically transforming the capital initiated by the leaders of the Great Han Empire continued after 1910. The major change was, of course, that thereafter a colonial state now attempted to use spatial reorganization to incorporate Koreans as subjects of the Japanese emperor.
THE LIMITS OF "URBAN REFORMS," 1910–1925
With the promulgation of the Annexation Treaty on August 29, 1910, Japanese authorities moved to gain full control over the symbolic topography not just of Seoul, but of the entire peninsula. To this end, they changed the name of the colony back to Chosen (Choson) from its previous designation, the Great Han Empire, a name associated with a nationalizing state under Emperor Kojong. In addition to "Great Han," the name "Hwangsong" as a designation for the capital of this former empire was prohibited. Instead, officials symbolically "renamed" the city Keijo, invoking the Chinese character for capital. As the political center of Japan's empire on the peninsula, this symbolic change mirrored the recent history of Edo, the seat of shogunal authority during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), which had been renamed Tokyo (literally, eastern capital) in 1868, replacing the ancient city of Kyoto (literally, capital city from 794 until 1868) as the new imperial capital. In the case of Japan, Tokyo did not emerge as the nation's symbolic center until 1889 due to the historical weight of Kyoto and the emperor's peregrinations outside of the new capital — practices recently reenacted by protectorate officials who had dispatched Sunjong (the last Korean emperor; r. 1907–10) on nationwide processions to promote Japan's control over the peninsula. Although the Korean capital was itself never relocated like Kyoto/Tokyo, the transformation of Hanyang/Hwangsong into Keijo was neither immediate nor uncontested, and it required spatial interventions that spanned the first fifteen years of Japanese rule (1910–25).
This project of respatialization was, like the annexation itself, launched on the path of subordinating and then desacralizing the Korean royal house. It thus began in symbolic fashion with the strategic reconstruction of the city's palaces, whose private grounds Japanese officials converted into civic parks and other public monuments. Made accessible for the first time, these once sacred sites were used to interpolate the Korean masses as subordinated members of the new imperial community. Before annexation, Japanese commentators — drawing on recent experiences of converting domanial complexes from the Tokugawa period into parks, schools, and other public spaces — commonly referred to Kyong'un Palace, Kojong's residence, as the "kingdom's castle" (J: ojo; wangsong) or the "imperial castle" (J: kojo; hwangsong). Already by 1907, protectorate officials had begun to downplay the symbolic importance of Kyong'un Palace, when they forced Kojong to abdicate in favor of his young son, Sunjong, Korea's last (puppet) emperor, whose residence was then relocated to Ch'angdok Palace. Between 1908 and 1911, Japanese officials, following the Meiji model of "modernizing" Ueno Park under imperial auspices, transformed the adjacent Ch'anggyong Palace into another public site, outfitted with a royal museum, zoo, and garden. Meanwhile, authorities quickly moved to destroy or sell buildings related to Kyonghui Palace, which had functioned as part of the ruling palace complex during the Great Han Empire. Parts of Kyong'un Palace, symbolically renamed Toksu Palace after Kojong's 1907 abdication, remained, although it was stripped of its modernizing emperor and the powerful symbols he wielded. In 1910, officials built a Western-style art museum on the grounds of this palace and, in 1914, replaced the Ring Hall Altar with another modern facility, the railway-operated Chosen Hotel. A similar fate awaited Kyongbok Palace, the "old castle" (J: kyu-ojo; ku-wangsong), the king's main residence until its destruction by Hideyoshi's invasions of 1590s. Although partially rebuilt during the reign of Kojong's regent father, the Hungson Taewon'gun (1863–73), this "old castle" had remained in disuse until its symbolic opening to public viewing in 1908. During the colonial period, this desacralized site became home to the new Government-General building (est. 1926) and the stage for several spectacular expositions. In this this way, Kyongbok Palace grounds aimed to display Japan's authority over the peninsula's ineluctable "progress" and Koreans' subordinated participation in colonial modernization.
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Excerpted from Assimilating Seoul by Todd A. Henry. Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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