The Imaginary Reconstruction of Keijō Imperial University: A Study Focusing on the Alumni Association Activities of Japanese after Repatriation

Abstract

This article aims to examine the process by which Japanese former students and faculty of Keijō Imperial University, known colloquially as Jōdai, built their experiences and memories into a collective construct after their repatriation following the Japanese Empires defeat in 1945, and to reveal the logic behind this construction. Jōdai, founded in 1924, was an ultra-elite institution, producing colonial knowledge about Korea until the universitys abolition in 1945. After repatriation, Japanese returnees from Jōdai formed alumni associations and reframed the university as a modern Korean higher education institution, while acting as self-appointed bridge-builders in the new relationship between South Korea and Japan. They also accorded new meaning to exploration of the Eurasian mainland and Japanese-Korean co-education as unique academic endeavors and trends separate from the colonial ruling structure, and they attempted to keep the spirit of these endeavors alive. The spirit of Jōdai, also known as Jōdai-ness, protected returnees experiences, as insider perspectives, from criticism of Jōdais colonialism. But shunting historical criticism of the universitys colonialism aside as an outsider perspective, and avoiding the perspectives of Koreans, the colonial other, makes any historical discussion of Japanese-Korean co-education and the mainland exploration based on it impossible. Ultimately, Jōdai alumni associations represent Jōdai-ness from the postwar Japanese victim-esque perspective of repatriation trauma and the mainland Japanese liberal perspective of the bad-boy culture of old-system high schools. Rather than searching for a historical logic for contemplating others, alumni association members hid themselves in a Japanese-style narrative world that imaginatively reconstructed the vanished past in a timeless realm, thus abandoning their own opportunity to face up to colonial Korea.