Seoul, City of Power

In the neighborhood where I live, there is a tall, long flight of stone steps. Houses packed tightly along the mountain ridge on both sides of the visibly ancient stairway create a strange sense of wonder. Climb the steps with some effort, and downtown Seoul spreads out below you at a glance. These are the steps of the Keijō Yasukuni Shrine, built during the Japanese colonial period. A giant torii must once have stood there to receive the spirits of those who fell in the Pacific War, but no trace of that past can be found. All that survives is the grand stone stairway. Even the stairway itself has been split in half to install an elevator. The traces of the past are being thoroughly destroyed.

The destruction does not stop at tangible things like buildings. Dropping in at the neighborhood hair salon, I interviewed a number of people who called themselves locals. And I was stunned to find that not a single interviewee knew a Japanese shrine had once stood there — despite a sign at the top of the steps marking the site of the former Keijō Gokoku Shrine. Out of a strange stubbornness I invested a great deal of time and effort in investigating, but with little to show for it. All I could establish was that the lot now occupied by a nap café and an E-mart was the site of the shrine’s main hall, and that part of the shrine building still remained as late as the 1980s. The Yasukuni Shrine failed even to leave proper photographs behind: one U.S. military aerial reconnaissance photo from the war years, and one photo of worshippers in front of the main hall — that is all. It is not even certain that the worship photo really shows the Yasukuni Shrine. Even the memory of how the once-enormous main hall and its auxiliary buildings were dismantled and vanished has not been handed down. The Yasukuni Shrine was stripped even of its intangible assets — memory and transmission.

When people hear of the Japanese Empire and the Government-General of Korea, they usually picture an overwhelming oppressor — the most powerful regime ever to appear on the Korean Peninsula. Yet even during the Pacific War, the very peak of its tyranny, Koreans met the Japanese with nothing but contempt and feigned obedience. Wasn’t it said that Koreans only listen when beaten? The result was thorough destruction and oblivion after liberation. The Government-General’s thirty-six years of assimilation policy failed utterly. Without the sincere cooperation of the governed in the state’s ideology, a seemingly mighty power is nothing but an empty show of force. That is the lesson of history left behind by the Government-General of Korea.

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