Korea/Culture as the Chosen Photographic Object: Focusing on Culture Joseon

Abstract

This article investigates the display strategy of the Empire's gaze as the perspective of a camera and Korean culture as its chosen photographic object through the analyses of articles and pictures in Culture Joseon (formerly Tour Joseon). Culture Joseon is a Japanese-language magazine published in Seoul from 1939 to 1944 during the late Japanese colonial period. It was a popular magazine that targeted as its audience ordinary travelers, businessmen, civil servants or anyone who was involved in the wartime business of the late Japanese colonial period or any other kinds of modern projects. As it had the capital, initiative, and the power and human network of a semi-official gazette, its extravagance was incomparable to other contemporary media, enabling Culture Joseon to show off the expansion of Japanese territory, advertise, and represent Korea as a stable colony. Examination of this text confirms that the empire's strategy of colonial administration mobilized the modern sensibility of travel and tourism to introduce, flaunt, and consume Korea and Korean culture. This strategy may have been effective in propagandizing the war and mobilizing colonial subjects in Japan and Korea. In addition, the homogenized and idealized images of Korea represented in the magazine conversely revealed that the design of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was a mere fantasy.