Abstrakt
The past and the present entwine in the urban fabric and shape human lives. This paper aims to reconstruct the processes of building Jemulpcho as a treaty port and as an important hub of the Japanese Empire in order to better understand the spatiality of the present-day city of Incheon, South Korea.
We wish to add to the studies of Japanese colonial urban development and verify if the "settlet urban legacies" (King, 1976) of the Japanese colonialism as defined by Liu (2013) in Taipei have taken comparable forms in Jemulpcho. We would discuss the potential particularities of Incheon as a port city to other urban forms within the Japanese Empire.
This would allow us to discuss whether and how the Japanese colonial urbanisation differed drastically from the British one, set as a model of colonial urbanisation by King (1976). Based on the principle of "man-environment" interaction, King (1976) identifies socio-economic factors as determining the colonial settlement outlay.
However, we see that the religious component has played a major role in shaping Dutch colonies in South Africa (Frescura, 2016) in comparison to the role of views of the natives and medical advances articulating the colonial settlement in the British Raj. Henry (2014)4 identifies sanitation and religion among key facotrs driving the Japanese assimilation of the colonial capital of Keijo (present-day Seoul) - we would be interested in seeing if and how the assimilation processes diverge in between colonial urban making (Jemulpo) and remaking (Keijo).
The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it will discuss the understanding of Japanese colonial urbanisation beyond the well-studies capitals of Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei and set basis toards future comparison in between Incheon and Kobe.
Second, we will demonstrate how the particular multi-layered colonial settlement in Incheon affects present-day collective memory building and place identity negotiation.