초록/요약

Following Japan's colonization of Korea, Japanese residents in Korea became one of the pillars in colonial society. This aims to articulate the colonial history of the Japanese residents in Korea by focusing on their relationship with their home country, that is, Japan. For this purpose, I analyzed Seoul guidebooks written and published by those Japanese residents to see what kind of Seoul images they tried to present to those in Japan. The central image of Seoul in those guidebooks is that Seoul became one of the most modernized megacities in the Japanese empire. First, Seoul was rapidly developed by the colonial authorities and the Japanese residents. Its infrastructure and administrative system were rapidly improved and its economy also grew significantly. Second, the development of Seoul has reached a level comparable to that of the largest cities in Japan and in East Asia. The reason why those Japanese cared about the status of Seoul was because Japan's discriminatory view on Korea was applied to the Japanese residents. They wanted to challenge the prevalent view that they belonged to the underdeveloped periphery of the empire. If Seoul could go beyond the boundary of underdeveloped Korea and become one of the most developed core cities in the Japanese empire, the gap between the Japanese living in Seoul and those living in their home country's large cities such as Tokyo can be bridged. However, this image of Seoul was advocated only by those in Korea. For the most Japanese, Seoul was still nothing more than a colonial city.