植民地朝鮮の表象―植民地の学習と教育の「テキスト」としての非文字資料

Abstract

By the beginning of the 20th century, over seventy percent of the earth was under colonial rule. Promoting the Industrial Revolution and the notion of “rich country, strong army,” European and American empires established mail and communication systems. As the great powers developed world’s fairs, they mass-produced picture postcards featuring photographs of goods, customs, and peoples from foreign lands (i.e., colonies), and postal systems delivered those colonial images around the world. Japan, as Asia’s earliest adopter of Western culture and institutions, mass-produced a variety of audiovisual materials (primarily photographs, picture postcards, drawings, maps, and movies) during the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, and those materials circulated both domestically and overseas. Cameras recorded conditions in Japan’s newly acquired Asian colonies, and those images were published in war reportage, picture postcards, lifestyle magazines, and national textbooks. In addition to contributing to war coverage and intelligence gathering, images served as educational materials that taught the Japanese people about their colonies. This paper address the historical context (Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars) behind the production of picture postcards of colonial Korea, providing an overview of their production and circulation. It continues by analyzing the new image of Korea produced when the postcards were transferred to other visual media. Focusing in particular on the correlation between postcards depicting Korean customs and prize-winning “images of Korea” in government exhibitions, the paper examines how images produced in picture postcards (i.e., “texts” on colonial Korea) served as effective advertising for colonial rule as part of Japan’s imperial expansion. The paper demonstrates that, while contributing to efforts to gather information about colonies, audiovisual materials also served well as texts that taught the Japanese about their colonies as they learned how to be imperial subjects. Traditionally, audiovisual materials (audiovisual historical materials) have not necessarily been treated as sources for academic investigation, but this project drew strong support from the work of scholars in a variety of research fields. It is of vital importance to develop a grasp of the current state of the research on audiovisual materials, while deepening a shared awareness of the historical value of such sources and pointing the way to new methods of utilizing them in the future. With the support of a JSPS grant-in-aid for Challenging Exploratory Research (“Imperial Exhibitions and the Construction and Modification of City Space in Colonial Keijyo”; research representative: PARK Mijeoung), the author arranged a space where collectors and researchers could hold discussions, and she ran a study group on picture postcards that focused on audiovisual materials produced in modern Asia. The members of the study group developed a new appreciation of the historical value of picture postcards, compiled databases, and considered new methods of sharing that data and utilizing it for historical research. Through its work, the group became aware of mutual disagreements about history that exist not only among researchers and collectors, but among Japan and its neighboring countries. The author believes that providing a place for researchers from all East Asian countries to meet and discuss will help spread shared awareness of the research being done on audiovisual materials and their value as historical sources. At the same time, those discussions are the first, and most important, matter to arrange in order to provide a point of entry to a shared understanding of the problems Asian nations face, beginning with their historical disagreements.