The structural inertias and resisting forces of Seoul, a 500 year-old historical city, determined the transformation of the urban space in all over the Japanese colonial period. With the completion of two monumental buildings, the new headquarter of t...
The structural inertias and resisting forces of Seoul, a 500 year-old historical city, determined the transformation of the urban space in all over the Japanese colonial period. With the completion of two monumental buildings, the new headquarter of the Colonial government and Joseon Shrine(朝鮮神宮), and the vigorous promotion of a masterplan to build a colonial administration city, 1920s culminated in the spatial division of the administrative fuction and economic function and completion of the symbolic landscape of the colonial capital to surpass the traditional royal symbolic space. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, with the so-called Kouminka policy, the enforced policy of colonial assimilation, the urban space of Gyeongseoung (Keijo) was turned into the experimentation field of military assimilationism. The Shrines in Gyeongseong were expanded and surveillance and discipline were strengthened in everyday life of civilians. Although such conflicts and contradictions were covered up violently and oppressively by the extreme assimilation policy of imperial militarism during the war time, it was bound to intrigue the 'politics of revenge' of people in a post-colonial era by intensifying the potential hostility of the colonial subjects.