The first Shintō shrines in Modern Korea were built by Japanese settler communities in the late nineteenth century. These were intended to meet the settlers’ religious needs and their construction was largely unregulated. After the annexation of Korea in 1910, the Government-General endeavoured to regulate shrines at first, then set out to implement a coherent Shintō policy on the peninsula. Starting with the imposing Chōsen Shrine in Seoul, a number of official state shrines were erected as sites for the staging of state rituals. With the intensification of assimilation policies, Korean subjects were expected – and later forced – to participate in such rituals to prove themselves as loyal subjects of the emperor. The forced nature of this practice was certainly one of the reasons why Shintō vanished without a trace from Korea after Japan’s surrender in 1945.

This panel examines the colonial discourse on questions such as the treatment of native Korean deities and religious practices, the possibility of their incorporation into State Shintō, and other questions related to Koreans’ cultural identity and their position within the Japanese empire. It analyses practices of indoctrination and co-optation, and surveys the construction of a religious landscape in the heart of Seoul that manifested Japanese ambitions to “Japanize” Korea. Thus, the panel tries to illuminate the role of Shintō in Japan’s colonial policy on the peninsula and suggests “Imperial Shintō” as a more apt description for the political religion of this era than State Shintō.

Shintō Shrine Policy in Colonial Korea

Kōichi Yamaguchi（Ōsaka Otemon University）

This talk will outline the initial policy concerning Japanese Shintō shrines in Korea and discuss its changes throughout the colonial period. Focusing on Shintō policy in Korea allows for dividing the colonial period of Korea into four periods, in each of which Shrine policy was changed due to internal or external circumstances. Whilst shrines on the Korean peninsula existed even prior to annexation, they were put under governmental control shortly after annexation. Whereas the first ten years of Japanese rule did not see much changes in overall policy, this changed in the wake of cultural rule from 1919, when, following the example of the mainland, reverence at Shintō shrines started to be explained as a nonreligious act in Korea as well.

This process intensified after the Manchurian incident, when shrine reverence, paired with rural revitalization campaigns, was turned into an act of expressing nationalism that was finally forced upon every citizen with the outbreak of full-fledged war with China. This paper will discuss, from a macroscopic perspective, which actors were involved in which ways in the establishment and development of Shintō in Korea. Finally, the talk examines how Korean society and the Japanese populace in the colony responded to the changes.

Landscape of assimilation: Seoul's Namsan mountain as “sacred space” (1892-1945)

Juljan Biontino（Chiba University）

Before the advent of Japanese rule, Namsan mountain served as guardian over Seoul and remained untouched by lumbermen and those seeking auspicious grave sites. Changch'ungdan, an altar to commemorate those who died serving the country was erected on the eastern foot of Namsan, and thus the mountain became linked to anti-Japanese sentiment. Prior to annexation, Japanese settlers had already built a first Shintō shrine on Namsan to accommodate for their religious needs. In the wake of colonial rule, Namsan was then turned into a testing ground for the employment of State Shintō in Korea. Subsequently, the whole area of Namsan was turned into a cultural park whose representations were used so Japanese citizens could reassure themselves as citizens of the empire, while Koreans were steadily drawn into taking part in Shintō rituals and learning about Japanese culture by visiting shrines and taking part in their events. Two Buddhist shrines were finally added to complete Namsan as a stage for assimilation policy and loyalty education.

In this talk, changes to the landscape of Namsan will be outlined to show how the – with only 265 meters rather unimpressive – mountain was appropriated by Japan as means of assimilation. It will be explained how Namsan, with each local actor on the mountain finding and fulfilling its own role, between 1892 and 1931 turned into a “sacred space” where the boundary of non-religious ritual of state and religious elements was gradually blurred, turning it into a spiritual base to support the war effort from 1931 to 1945.

Blurring Identities: Susanoo and the Ideological Incorporation of Koreans into the Japanese Family State

David Weiss（Rikkyo University）

In the early Meiji period, political thinkers endeavoured to transform Japan into a modern nation state, following the Western model. One of the central challenges of the Meiji oligarchs was the creation of a collective national consciousness that harboured a sense of national unity, historical continuity and cultural uniqueness. This was realized in the ideological construct of Japan as a family state with the emperor as the father of the nation. The family state ideology was based on ancient mythology and emphasized the emperor’s descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu. By depicting the nation as a large family, it not only fostered a sense of national belonging but also justified hierarchical differences as natural.

This ideology was called into question, however, when Japan acquired its first colonies. How were the colonial subjects to be incorporated into the Japanese family state? In the case of Korea, the theory of common ancestry of Japanese and Koreans (Nissen dōsoron), that had first been formulated by historians in the 1890s, was adopted by Shintō activists to incorporate the new colonial subjects by expanding the boundaries of the Japanese family state. In this process, Susanoo, the impulsive and immature little brother of Amaterasu, was identified as ancestral deity of the Korean people. Susanoo was thus used to blur the boundaries of the Japanese family state. Through the prism of Susanoo, this paper examines the negotiation of Koreans’ position within the Japanese empire in the colonial discourse.

The logic of enshrining a Korean progenitor deity in Shintō Shrines – The Imperial Shintō of Modern Japan

Masaaki Aono（Momoyama Gakuin University）

In the modern period, Japanese Shrine Shintō, with the reverence of Amaterasu Ōmikami at its center, was also brought to colonial Korea, where it changed with the development of Japanese and Korean national consciousness and became closely linked to Tennō ideology.

This link was established through a policy on religions called “Movement to develop the fields of heart” (shinden kaihatsu undō) that was implemented by the Government-General in Korea from January 1936 in response to the proclamation of national polity (kokutai meichō) in Japan proper (1935). In this process, the colonial authorities also enforced worship at Shintō shrines.

This talk seeks to explain the logic of State Shintō that was established with this policy from the viewpoint of nationalism. As an expression of this logic, the Ministry of Home Affairs (naimushō) and the Government-General of Korea created a “Korean” ancestral progenitor deity named Kunitama no Ōkami.

This deity was enshrined together with Amaterasu Ōmikami in eight state-sponsored shrines (kokuhei shōsha) in total, starting with Keijō shrine. The hidden logic behind enshrining both deities together, was that while Japanese were directly linked to Amaterasu, Koreans were only indirectly linked to the imperial ancestress via Kunitama no Ōkami. This can be regarded as an expression of racial ranking within the Japanese Empire, that is, as the creation of an imperial Shintō that engendered a multiethnic, imperial nationalism.

The worship of Kunitama no Ōkami as a Korean progenitor deity was the final decision reached by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Government-General of Korea. Other options that had been discussed in Japan proper from the Meiji period onward, such as the worship of Susanoo or Tan’gun, on the other hand, were discarded.